JFK and the long shadow caused by the Bay of Pigs Updated / Thursday, 15 Apr 2021 09:37 Federico Fidel Fernandez, a Miami Cuban refugee, listens to President Kennedy's television address 22nd October 1962, in which the President explained the United States' position on the Cuban situation to the American people and the world. Analysis: The lessons Kennedy had learned from the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs were to stand him - and the world - in good stead during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Cuban-American relations still remain complex sixty years later. Sixty years ago, on 17 April 1961, a brigade of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) trained Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs. These exiles were part of a covert US plan, developed in the final year of the Eisenhower administration, to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro. Eisenhower had previously used the CIA to overthrow problematic regimes in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.