CIA Documents Shed Light on Puerto Rico's Role in Bay of Pigs Invasion, Confirm Surveillance of Pro-Independence Activists

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles and designated a now-defunct Air  Force Base as a casualty evacuation point in preparation for the Bay of Pigs Invasion, according to newly released documents.

“In November 1960 Cuban exiles were trained on Vieques Island in preparation for the Bay of Pigs landing,” reads a document written by [REDACTED] Chief of the Latin America Division dated Aug. 14, 1978 that responds to a letter from then-Congressman Ronald Dellums asking if the agency had ever gathered intelligence on the Puerto Rican independence movement and trained foreign nationals in the archipelago. 

Cuban exiles trained in the use of Landing Craft Utility (LCU) and landing craft, vehicle, personnel (LCVP) vehicles, according to a letter dated January 1961 inside of another document dated May 5, 1961 with the title “Clandestine Services History,” which serves as an after-action summary of the Bay of Pigs Invasion with recommendations for the next time they tried to invade Cuba. These boats were originally reconditioned by the Navy, explains another part of the document. [REDACTED] and CIA personnel trained in their use in Little Creek, Virginia. These boats would have delivered vehicles and supplies to Cuba during the amphibious part of the invasion.

“Cuban crew training is progressing satisfactorily. These craft with their crews will soon be ready for operations,” wrote United States Marine Corps Colonel J. Hawkins in the letter. While the name of the base in Vieques is not mentioned, Camp García was used for amphibious landing training when it was still operational (assuredly in between the US Navy bombing residents of the tiny island and its neighbor Culebra, which is still being used for military training).

The document details actions taken by the CIA and the agency’s assets inside Cuba to undermine the Castro government, including recruiting a 500-strong strike force of Cuban exiles (who fought with each other so much that “political bickering” was included as a hurdle to recruitment) and acts of sabotage such as committing 110 bombings of Communist Party offices, Havana power stations, bus terminals, among other targets.

Another part of the same document explains the Department of Defense initially planned to establish a field hospital in Vieques, which was meant to be operational five days after the day of the initial invasion. However, the plan was abandoned in favor of evacuating casualties by air or sea to Ramey Air Force Base in Aguadilla, a municipality on the northwestern tip of the archipelago’s main island. However, the document does not mention if any of the casualties from the Bay of Pigs were actually transported to the base when everything went sideways.

I'd be remiss here if I did not mention that Vieques still does not have a fully functioning hospital eight years after Hurricane María decimated the old one. Construction of the new one is supposed to end in December 2025.

The documents were released in late December at the request of Democratic Reps. Joaquin Castro and Jimmy Gomez, who want the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to “declassify all documents related to the surveillance and harassment of Latino civil rights leaders from the 1950s to the 1970s,” according to Axios, which was the first news agency to report on these documents. However, it is unclear to me if the documents titled “Clandestine Services History” and “D/CIA Daybook” (mentioned below) are part of the same batch of documents because they have a different release date compared to the other documents.

Just a few short months after Hawkins wrote the report, the U.S. began planning another invasion of Cuba under the codename Operation ORTSAC (Castro spelled backwards) in 1962 as the Cuban Missile Crisis came underway. The operation planned for amphibious and airborne landings in Cuba, as well as reading a proclamation that read ”all persons in occupied territory will obey promptly all orders.” It never happened.

“Once the ‘aggressive Castro regime has been completely destroyed,’ and the U.S. installed a new government ‘responsive to the needs of the people of Cuba,’ the proclamation concluded, the U.S. armed forces would ‘depart and the traditional friendship of the United States and the government of Cuba will once more be assured,’” writes the National Security Archive in a post commemorating the 55th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In preparation of the proposed invasion of Cuba, the U.S. military sent 40 warships to train in Vieques, according to the Smithsonian. Photos obtained by the Smithsonian show Marines riding small jeeps, tanks and boats along the shore, as well as marines practicing getting on and off boats. If you squint, you can see several boats on the beach, likely the same that Cuban exiles used to train a year earlier.

Ramey actually served an important part for the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The U.S. carried out a military demonstration for 60 Latin American military officials and five delegates of the Inter-American Defense Board at the base shortly before the event, according to a chronology put together by the National Security Archive. The five naval units and marine infantry battalion that participated in the demonstration stayed in the Caribbean. Shortly afterwards, a newspaper in Colombia published testimony of a South American diplomat who witnessed the demonstration.

Ramey Air Force Base is now the Rafael Hernandez International Airport, which houses the Coast Guard Air Station Borinquen, whose logo my old roommate described as “holy graphic design.” I kind of dig it though.

“During the Invasion, [Director of Central Intelligence] Allen Dulles was in Puerto Rico to give a speech and President Kennedy was at his country estate in Virginia. Both evidently assumed that their absence from Washington would enable them to deny any connection with the operation. Dulles was so completely cut off from events that he did not know the venture failed until he returned to Washington,” reads an excerpt from “17 April 1961: The Bay of Pigs Invasion” written by CIA Chief Historian [REDACTED] found in a CIA document released in April 2024.

You can find the speech Dulles gave in Puerto Rico to the Young Presidents' Organization here.

As El Nuevo Día reported, the documents also confirm what many Puerto Ricans already knew to be true: the U.S. intelligence apparatus surveilled the Puerto Rican independence movement. The surveillance was conducted as part of the CIA’s CHAOS or MHCHAOS operation, whose mission was to uncover foreign interference in domestic protest movements. (The CIA is not supposed to operate on domestic soil but when has that ever stopped them.)

“There have been two instances of Agency analysis of developments in Puerto Rico. [REDACTED] in July 1954 expressed an opinion that there was a trend towards pro-independence sympathies in Puerto Rico under the then [REDACTED]. The writer merely commented he felt that independence would be welcomed by the majority of Puerto Ricans, that independence would gain friends for the United State and that it would also improve the prestige of Puerto Rico,” reads the document written in response to Congressman Dellum’s letter. 

The document mentions several instances where the CIA gathered information on the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, including being sent a list of names of activists in the Pro Independence Movement and “attempts” made to discover the Cuban links to the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. 

Two documents in the batch are of particular interest to me. The first is a request from the CIA’s representative in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago for any information the FBI “may be able to furnish or may develop” concerning the connections between the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) and Michael Als, an important working class activist from Trinidad and Tobago. Meanwhile, the second is a list of activists throughout the U.S. that includes three activists who were part of the PSP, including a University of Puerto Rico geography professor who was pro-independence.

"At the present time there are no intelligence collection operations in or out of Puerto Rico involving persons residing in Puerto Rico," reads the CIA response to Congressman Dellums.

A counterintelligence memo — which is not part of the CIA documents but is important to mention for context’s sake — from the director of the Special Investigations Division of the Puerto Rican Police to then-Governor Rafael Hernández Colón found by Erick Figueroa Hernández, school director at the New Pedagogy School in Caguas, links a CIA cell to the bombing of a PSP event commemorating the birth of Eugenio María de Hostos, a pro-independence activist, in January 1975. 

“The mission of this group is to carry out psychological and political operations to discredit the [PSP]. This group is led by three CIA operators (agents) and has an active membership of four Puerto Ricans and four Cuban exiles,” reads the memo, which also highlights the CIA cell was apparently shut down shortly after the bombing when the Puerto Rican contingent of the cell got scared because they killed a person.

The memo ends with “we have received information to the effect that the group has been activated again. We hope to continue monitoring their activities.”

Figueroa Hernández published an excerpt of his research (only in Spanish) with Claridad, which was once the official publication of the now-defunct PSP, and his findings were highlighted in a recent El Nuevo Día article (in English) that affirmed the CIA continued operating in Puerto Rico throughout the 1970s. El Nuevo Día's article also interviewed a former federal prosecutor who said the CIA had an office in Santurce, a neighborhood of San Juan, between 1971 and 1976.

The 2013 Snowden leaks revealed that Puerto Rico served as a “center of covert spying for several Latin American countries” for a joint operation between the CIA and the National Security Agency, according to Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism.

If you want to have a very fun (read: depressing) time looking over U.S. intelligence surveillance, the FBI Vault has 11 pdfs worth of COINTELPRO documents about Puerto Rican groups. For decades, the Puerto Rican Police Force and the FBI collaborated in a mass surveillance program of pro-independence activists that we call “las carpetas" (the files). To be completely honest, that requires its own separate article because of how deep the rabbit hole goes, so I will spare you a dissection here.

For what it's worth, most of what I have summarized in this post was already "known" (i.e. part of Puerto Rico's leftist folklore) but it's always nice to have receipts.

The CIA documents, some of which remain partially redacted, can be found here. 

That's the meat of this newsletter post, but I wanted to draw your attention to two things I worked on as 2025 was getting underway. I wrote a news story for The Latino Newsletter about an American tourist that allegedly burned down three businesses and seriously damaged part of a hotel in Cabo Rojo, a town on the southwesternmost tip of Puerto Rico. The original article includes a scooplet about how the alleged arsonist's original stay was supposed to last one more week, but she left immediately after allegedly causing the fire. I was also the first person to confirm that she had not been arrested by the ATF, as some influencers were claiming on TikTok (RIP) and Instagram, which was later added to the article as an update.

That was big news for a few days after it happened, which led to The New Yorker reaching out to see if I had any pictures they could use for an article about the arson. When they called I did not have any pictures, but I went up there the next day at 4am and got the shot, as well as a few other ones for any follow-up articles. So, that was pretty big for me and – to be honest – I'm still riding that high a little bit.

Here's to bigger and better things in 2025!