The Exiles’ War

For more than four decades, the struggle against Fidel Castro extended far beyond Cuba.What began as a U.S.-supported covert campaign after the Cuban Revolution developed into a sprawling world of exile organizations, intelligence operations, clandestine training camps, maritime raids, bombings, assassinations, and political influence stretching from Miami to Washington, Venezuela, Chile, and the Caribbean.The Exiles' War reconstructs that history from the rise of the first anti-Castro exile organizations through the Bay of Pigs, JMWAVE, Operation Mongoose, Alpha 66, Omega 7, CORU, the bombing campaign that transformed 1970s Miami, the destruction of Cubana Flight 455, and the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington.Drawing on declassified CIA and FBI records, congressional investigations, court proceedings, intelligence reports, contemporary journalism, and the surviving documentary record, we examine how organizations originally created, trained, supported, or monitored by American agencies gradually developed lives of their own.The result was a difficult contradiction. Washington attempted to restrain unauthorized violence while continuing to regard pressure against Havana as strategically useful. Former covert-action networks persisted after official sponsorship diminished. Some turned toward increasingly autonomous operations, while law enforcement struggled with secrecy, community intimidation, political protection, conflicting intelligence, and the problem of distinguishing allegations from evidence that could survive in court.The violence eventually declined, but the political project did not disappear.The final years trace the transformation from paramilitary action into institutional power: the rise of the Cuban American National Foundation, Radio Martí, sanctions legislation, congressional influence, and a second generation that inherited the anti-Castro cause through family, community, and political institutions rather than clandestine warfare.The Exiles' War is a history of covert action and its aftermath-of what happens when a government helps create an irregular force, withdraws from direct control, and discovers that the networks, grievances, and political objectives it helped cultivate can survive for generations.