Havana, April 19 (Prensa Latina) With the victory of the mercenary invasion of Playa Girón, on a day like today, April 19, 1961, Cuba demonstrated to the world its willingness to defend with arms the revolutionary process begun on April 1. January 1959.
After tough fighting after the landing three days before of some 1,500 mercenaries in that area of the Zapata Swamp, in the western province of Matanzas, the forces of the Rebel Army, the National Revolutionary Police and the popular militias defeated the invaders.
“Do not stop the tanks until the mats are wet with the water from the beach, because every minute that these mercenaries are on our soil entails an affront to our country,” the maximum leader of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, had ordered.
The aggression was organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency and had the air and naval support of the Army of that northern power whose government sought, since then, to reverse the process of social transformations in Cuba.
For Fidel Castro, the historical importance of April 19, 1961 transcended the country's limits because that day, he said, Yankee imperialism received its first great defeat in America.
In an act of commemoration for the anniversary in 1965, the revolutionary leader stated that the victory at Playa Girón “marked the day on which the plans drawn up by the brainy generals of the Pentagon, by the luminaries of the Central Intelligence Agency, fell apart.” .
Taken from Cubaminrex