Fidel Castro’s Brother Reports for Duty at the Bay of Pigs
The CIA’s long-standing policy on nepotism finally pays a dividend.
FILE REF: AM/THUG-1. Operational directive issued 17 March 1960. Langley Station authorises full funding for the recruitment of a suitable asset to replace the incumbent head of state in Cuba. The target, Fidel Castro, had become… inconvenient. The Agency’s first fifteen plans were rejected for being too complicated, too stupid, or for involving an exploding conch shell. The sixteenth plan was simpler: find a body double, train him, and swap him in during a pre-planned amphibious assault. Standard procedure. An operational budget of 42.5 million roubles—sorry, dollars—was allocated.
The CIA’s Miami Station, a place professionally dedicated to wishful thinking, found the perfect candidate: an obscure Tampa cigar-roller named ‘Felipe’. He had the look, the voice, and, most importantly, a grudge. Felipe, it transpired, was Fidel’s estranged identical twin, disowned years earlier over what the recruitment file [redacted] refers to only as “a deeply unfortunate incident involving a prize-winning goat and the last of the family’s good rum.” Convinced that his brother’s beard was ideologically unsound and frankly derivative of his own, Felipe signed on. He proved a quick study, mastering Fidel’s bombastic speaking style, his gait, and his habit of pointing emphatically at pie charts illustrating sugar yields.
On 17 April 1961, Brigade 2506 hit the beaches at Playa Girón. The invasion was a textbook disaster—until it wasn’t. While the main force was being ground to paste by Castro’s T-34s, a small CIA Pathfinder unit slipped into Havana and delivered Felipe to the Radio Reloj building. He went on air, announced he had seen the error of his socialist ways, and declared rum a capitalist commodity to be enjoyed by all. The broadcast was chaos. Half of the Cuban army, hearing their Comandante apparently three sheets to the wind, laid down their arms in confusion. The other half, assuming it was a loyalty test, redoubled their attacks. It was a 50/50 chance. The coin flip landed for America.
The real Fidel, racing to the front line, was arrested by his own confused officers, who assumed *he* was the imposter sent to spread disinformation. He was detained at a military barracks in Santa Clara, where he spent the next forty-eight hours screaming into a pillow as Felipe, live on television, tearfully embraced Richard Nixon and declared “Tricky Dick is my brother now.” President Kennedy, watching from the Oval Office, reportedly asked his brother Bobby, “Did we do that? On purpose?” No clear answer was ever recorded. By the time the truth was untangled, Felipe was ensconced in the Presidential Palace, the CIA was taking a victory lap, and Cuba’s new national anthem was, for some reason, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’.
