Crisis Over Berlin and the Bay of Pigs

Two major Cold War events that marked Kennedy's presidency were the building of the Berlin Wall, and the Bay of Pigs disaster.


Just two weeks before Kennedy took office as president, Eisenhower had cut off all American relations with Cuba because Cuba's dictator, Fidel Castro, openly called himself a communist and was accepting aid from the Soviet Union. When Castro was in power, he seized several American and British oil refineries and began dividing up privately owned land to be worked on by communes. Much of this land was owned by American-based sugar companies. For these reasons, the U.S. was very wary of Cuba at the time.
Though some Cubans thought that Castro was a good leader, others saw his government as replacing one dictatorship with another. As a result, 10% of Cuba's population went into exile in the U.S. when Castro came into power. Because of this migration, a Cuban counterrevolutionary movement began to take shape in Miami. In March 1960, Kennedy secretly gave permission for the CIA to begin training Cuban exiles as soldiers.
The U.S. government's plan was to land the trained Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in Southern Cuba and have them fight Castro's army and, in theory, spread the resistance to enough Cubans that Castro's regime would soon topple. Unfortunately, things did not go as planned.
On April 17, 1961, some 1300-1500 Cuban exiles landed in the Bay of Pigs. A CIA airstrike that was reported to have been successful had missed its mark, and a small advance group sent to distract Castro's forces never landed. Instead, the Cuban exiles were met by 25,000 of Castro's troops, armed with Soviet tanks and jets. Some Cuban exiles were captured; others were killed.
In the end, Kennedy had to bargain with Castro and send him $53 million in food and supplies to get the captured exiles back. The Bay of Pigs would be remembered from then on as a "perfectly excecuted failure".


Shortly after the conclusion of World War II, the Soviet Union had taken control of Eastern Germany and forced it to be a satellite state, while the Western powers took control of Western Germany, making it a capitalist democracy. It turned out that conditions in East Germany were worse than those in West Germany, and as a result, by 1961, 3 million East Germans had fled to West Germany through the divided city of Berlin. Not only did these refugees tell the rest of the world about how bad conditions were in East Germany, but their escape caused massive economic issues in East Germany by thinning the workforce.
This growing trend concerned Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. At first, he attempted to close off all road access to Western Berlin, but Kennedy refused to let this happen, and, due to the nuclear capability of the U.S., Khrushchev had to find another way around the problem. He instead ordered East German troops on August 13, 1961 to build the Berlin Wall to keep East Germans from fleeing to West Germany.
At first, some in the U.S. government suggested that the U.S. fight to keep the wall from going up, but Kennedy decided to let it stand as proof to the rest of the world that, when given a choice between communism and capitalism, most people will choose capitalism.

By Paul, D period.