The years between 1953 and 1962 bore witness to two of the United States’ most notorious counterinsurgency ventures. Aimed at overthrowing the leftist governments in Cuba and Guatemala, the two operations employed American-supported covert “indigenous” proxy forces made up of disaffected citizens and exiles of each country seeking to spark popular uprisings against the regimes. Both operations were led clandestinely by the CIA and deliberately designed to appear as though they were entirely Latin affairs. The Guatemala operation succeeded entirely in achieving its goal of removing the country’s leftist leader, a result that strongly influenced the decision to launch the doomed Cuba operation intended to repeat the magic against Fidel Castro’s regime. Its failure was likely a major reason that Washington largely abandoned this type of intervention in Latin America for the rest of the Cold War.

This chapter analyzes the Operation PBSUCCESS in Guatemala in 1954 and the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba seven years later, weighing the policy priorities and miscalculations that led the United States to undertake them. This discussion provides a sharp contrast to the U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Latin America treated in the chapters that follow: by 1964, the United States had moved more toward supporting and training on-the-ground domestic counterinsurgent forces as well as providing economic development assistance to stem the Marxist revolutionary tide sweeping the Americas.