Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, by Max Hastings. Photo / Toby Madden
60 years ago the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war. In an edited extract from his new book, Max Hastings describes its precursor, Operation Zapata, aka the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Just before midnight on April 16, 1961, five rustbucket transport vessels dropped anchor 2000 yards off the coast of Cuba, to launch one of the most disastrous military operations in history. Would-be liberators aboard the ships, clad in camouflage-pattern fatigues and now donning web equipment and taking up weapons, were surprised to find the shoreline showing lights: American briefers had told them they would land at a deserted resort area.
They went ahead anyway. Frogmen scrambled clumsily down into rubber boats, then set forth to place guidance beacons for the assault force to follow. Against orders, their American instructors accompanied the teams as they laid the markers. They opened fire upon a jeep moving up the beach, causing the shore lights to vanish. Wild shooting followed, from both attackers afloat and local militia among the palms and mangroves.
Back on a transport Jose Perez "Pepe" San Romain, one of the operation's Cuban commanders, urged on by Central Intelligence Agency touchline coaches, set about landing his men. He was a 29-year-old former army officer imprisoned by the old Havana regime, liberated in January 1959 by the victorious revolutionaries. He had later broken with Fidel Castro; was again briefly imprisoned; then fled to the United States. His claims on command at Playa Giron, designated "Blue Beach", were that he was one of only a small minority of the invaders who knew something about soldiering, albeit nothing about war.
San Romain was sufficiently realistic about the prospects to hand to an American for safe-keeping $10,000 in US currency and $25,000 in forged Cuban pesos that he had been given as a cash float to pay local people once a beachhead was established. When his own boat touched the shore, he made a suitably theatrical gesture by kissing the sand. San Romain's arrival was smoother than that of most of the invaders. CIA planners had failed to notice offshore coral reefs, on which several craft stranded.
As exile officer Erneido Oliva and his staff jumped down from their transport into a light aluminium boat, one landed on top of its helmsman, knocking him into the sea. The boat drifted away bearing seven men, none of whom knew how to start the outboard motor. They bobbed in limbo for 45 minutes, watching spectacular pyrotechnics on the beach and listening to explosions and bursts of fire, until rescued and towed in by a launch. Most of the outboard motors proved unserviceable, so that by 5.30a.m. on April 17 the landing schedule was wildly awry, with one infantry battalion still stuck on a transport, together with the ammunition for the entire force.
The invaders had been assured by their American mentors that they could expect to land unopposed; that it would take Fidel Castro 72 hours to deploy regular troops to meet them. As it was, thoroughly alerted militia were firing furiously, and heavy metal was on its way to support them. The liberators had also been told that the Cuban air force would be neutralised by their own attacking planes, disguised as Havana's. In reality, the renegade fliers failed to inflict decisive damage, though killing and wounding sufficient people to present Castro with a propaganda coup.
One aircraft, damaged apparently by Cuban flak, caused a sensation by forced-landing at Miami International Airport, where the authorities asserted that it was flown by Castro defectors.
When the Havana regime's planes started to attack the invasion flotilla soon after 7am, consequences were catastrophic. The Houston was hit by a rocket that passed through the hull without exploding, but made a hole big enough to cause the captain to feel obliged to beach his vessel two hours later. A Hawker Sea Fury, originally sold to the Batista regime by the British, hit the Rio Escondido, which promptly blew up. This one ship carried the expedition's entire stores of fuel, medical supplies, communications equipment, rations and ammunition. Meanwhile, inland, a force of exile paratroops descended into a chaos matching that on the beaches. Many landed amid swamps, and almost all found themselves lost.
Within a few hours it became apparent that the exiles were doomed, their deaths or surrender delayed only by the sluggishness of the defenders. The shooting, confined to a few thousand yards of sand, mangrove and palms within sight of the sea, continued for three days. It was intended by its American planners to precipitate a mass uprising by the oppressed Cuban people, eager to throw off the shackles of Castro. Instead, exile prisoners found themselves taunted by furious cries from crowds of local people, who spat in their faces: "Paredon! Paredon! Paredon!" — "The Wall! The Wall! The Wall!" Cubans were baying for blood, and not that of Fidel: this was local shorthand for a demand for the "liberators"' execution.
The surviving transport ships offshore sailed away to save themselves, leaving the rump of the invaders to their fate. The world learned to know the invasion place as the Bay of Pigs, Bahia de Cochinos. The Cuban people, however, sought to endow the event with a title more resonant and grandiose, and chose instead another local place-name Playa Giron, which is how to this day the attack is known and celebrated on the island. President John F. Kennedy, commander-in-chief of the planet's most powerful nation, had granted to Fidel Castro, commander-in-chief of one of the weakest, a priceless victory, which strengthened the Cuban's bizarrely inflated status, his superstar celebrity.
Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, by Max Hastings (HarperCollins, $38), is out on October 5.
1 When you sit down to design a compilation book like Annual 3, what are your considerations?
Annual 3 is a unique publication. There is nothing else quite like it in Aotearoa, New Zealand — or even internationally — which gives a lot of freedom creatively. However, it was important to keep in mind the previous two annuals and maintain some continuity. Designing a compilation publication brings its own challenge in that the content is wonderfully diverse but the design has to unite it as one entity without becoming bland. The book needs to be visually dynamic and full of surprises but not patronise. Today's kids are visually very literate.
2 Annual 3 is very colourful and enticing, but the palette is edited. How did you choose the colours you used?
Ideally the colour amplifies the mood of the narrative and unites the page to make it powerful and eye-catching. Most of the colour choices in the book were driven by the artwork and content — a colour picked out of a photo or illustration would be used to colour a heading or textbox, helping to unify the layout as one. I do look to the intended audience and how other books use colour when engaging readers of a similar age but mostly it's important to find your point of difference — not being afraid to try unusual colour combinations.
3 There are some great vintage photos in the book — how did that come about?
Susan and Kate had a fantastic shortlist of images from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Alexander Turnbull Library and Hawke's Bay Museum Tai Ahuriri to choose from. It was pretty hard to know what to leave out as we could only use a small number of them.
How an image is placed within a layout plays a major part in what they communicate. For example, choosing to show two images taken seconds apart can tell a different story than just using one. Similarly, the size of photograph is important. In Annual 3 there is a stunning image from Napier Main School in the 1880s that was initially used on a single page. It didn't do the image justice, so I increased it to run across a double-page spread, making the students' faces clearer and expressions distinct. It really brought the image to life.
While laying out the book the photographs always brought a smile to my face. If an image still does that after repeated views, you know you have picked something special.
4 Middle grade readers can be sensitive to anything they deem "too young". How do you create a book that looks engaging and fun — but not overly so?
This is probably one of the biggest questions you keep asking yourself as you put a book together for this age group. With Annual 3 we worked on keeping the design multi-layered, and not make visual puns and metaphors too obvious. There is a lot of detail to engage with that hopefully makes it an enjoyable read for readers 9 years and up. I don't think there is any upper age limit.
5 What makes a particularly satisfying spread for you? Do you have a favourite in this book and why?
A tough question. I would have to give you a few. Both The Lost Marbles by Gavin Mouldey and The Champion, illustrated by Ant Sang, took hours of careful prepress work to get the best colour reproduction that we could and it's very satisfying to see the end result. Written by Maurice Gee, The Champion is a New Zealand classic, reversioned for the first time in the annual as a 16-page comic. The wild biro drawings by Sam Duckor-Jones in The Screenplay spreads convincingly suggest a kid doodling on their screenplay. These are all spreads that were hard won. By contrast the Flushed spread, illustrated by Kimberly Andrews, and the Scrabble spread were satisfying for finding their good looks quickly. The Scrabble spread was probably the fastest spread in the book to design — it's simple and engaging and was really fun to do. It brought back good memories of my gran, who was an ace on the board.
Annual 3: A miscellany from Aotearoa New Zealand, designed by Marus Thomas, edited by Susan Paris and Kate De Goldi, (Annual Ink, $45).
Peninsula by Sharron Came
(Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30)
Reviewed by Siobhan Harvey
The natural landscape of Northland and three generations of a fierce farming family, the Carltons, are the focal points of the 10 short stories in Wellington author Sharron Came's evocative and skillful first collection, Peninsula.
At heart, this is a literary work about the relationship between people and their landscape. In the opening story, Peacocks, for instance, family patriarch Jim juggles the demands of his farm, his relationship with his eldest, John, who works with him, the unexpected arrival of a bird on his land and a nostalgia for his property's earlier times. Here, we're reminded, place is a portal to memories that affirm that even when you are the boss, sometimes your best times are behind you.
In the titular tale, meanwhile, daughter Rachel navigates a day's hiking through the hinterlands of home, her brother Willy's disastrous break-up and criminality, and learning about the loss of a school frenemy. The exertions of trekking are also to the fore in a later piece like Tramp, in which Rachel's twin Jack returns to the narrative (fleetingly present as he was in the first tale). Here, a burly besties' get-together in a cramped mini called Mozart, then a tent on an outcrop during a bitter night goes awry thanks to an unwelcome, rifle-bearing visitor called Ember Eye.
Throughout, even when Came seems to take a tangential foray into a supporting character's historic difficulties and enlightenment, as occurs in the story Trailblazer, her exploration of people and place evokes a deeper social, cultural and political message. For the connection the author explores between characters and geography highlights the significance of symbiosis, an evolving landscape paralleled by evolving relationships, the two existing in coaction.
Environmentalism as a political cause is never offered as an "in your face" manifesto, but it's evident more indirectly in the milieu of Peninsula. The frequent presence of rangers, for example, as part of the extended cast. The discussion of irrigation in one story; of tourist pollution in another. It's also a motif evoked in the poetic style of prose Came ascribes to her characters' perceptions of the whenua. "Fog blurs night and dawn, bewitches earth and sky," the author writes lyrically, for instance, as Rachel reconnects to the bush.
This cadent style of writing, along with the book's themes, is reminiscent of earlier New Zealand authors, such as Maurice Duggan, as well as international aficionados of the interconnected short story form like Canadian Nobel Prize Laureate Alice Munro.
In its intricate charting of the complex Carlton whānau, though, Peninsula remains its own work. A strong, family-centred book about how our lives are inextricably bound to the wellbeing or otherwise of the places where we live.
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