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Eduardo Zayas-Bazán was a 24-year-old lawyer when he left Cuba for the United States and joined about 1,400 other Cuban exiles, who were known as Brigade 2506, to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the botched 1961 mission to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime.
Always a gifted swimmer, he was a frogman, and when he stepped on the shores of Playa Girón on the southern coast of the island, he was shot in the right knee by friendly fire. When the US government-backed incursion failed —largely due to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to withdraw plans to strike Castro’s airfields—the human cost was significant: about 100 exiles died during the attacks, and Zayas-Bazán was arrested along with hundreds of others. He had served for about a year when the Kennedy administration negotiated for the return of exiles from the island to the US.
Fast forward more than half a century, and Zayas-Bazán is now a 90-year-old retired professor who taught at East Tennessee State University. His experience has become memorialized in the new Bay of Pigs Museum and Library in Miami’s historic Little Havana, which opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 17, the 65th anniversary of the disastrous invasion. After five years of planning, the 11,000 square foot building was erected on the site of the original Brigade 2506 meetinghouse, a one-story building with a Spanish-tile roof where veterans gathered regularly. At a cost of more than $8 million, the new two-story facility contains numerous glass displays, multiple screens playing interviews of veterans, and a towering mural of the Cuban flag that greets visitors near the entrance.
The museum has been a rare point of unity for Florida Democrats and Republicans. President Donald Trump stopped at the original house during his 2016 campaign, and the site has also been visited by politicians like Marco Rubio and Florida Sen. Rick Scott. Eileen Higgins, who was elected last year to be Miami’s first Democrat mayor in nearly 30 years, secured funding for the museum. “We’ve got to put party lines aside,” Carlos Luis, the museum president, told me. “This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”
“We’ve got to put party lines aside. This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”
Most of the men involved in the mission were young with no military experience, many of whom received only a few months of training before the invasion. One of them was Luis’s father, René Luis, who ran an accounting firm in Cuba with his family. When the elder Luis was released from prison after 22 months following the Bay of Pigs, he settled in Miami with his wife. They had seven children. Before dinner, Carlos recalled, the family sang Cuba’s national anthem. His father didn’t open up much about his experience, apart from blaming Kennedy for the failed mission, and he died in 2024 without ever setting foot on the island again. “My involvement here,” Luis said, “is the least I can do for my father.”
For Zayas-Bazán, president of the Brigade’s association and a member of the museum’s board, the new building provides a vivid excursion through his memories. Wearing a crisply ironed guayabera, a traditional linen shirt popular in Cuba, he strode through the exhibits, stopping at the front entrance to point out a video playing black-and-white footage of Havana’s waterfront lined with hotels and bustling city streets; his glasses reflected images of a now-vanished Cuba. “This shows what Cuba was like,” he told me. “So that the people can see what Havana was like before 1959”—the year Fidel Castro took control of the island.
He stopped at a glass display lined with photos from 1962, when hundreds of Brigade 2506 members who had been imprisoned in Cuba returned to Miami. The photos show young men stepping off airplanes and into the arms of loved ones waiting for them on the tarmac. One such photo is of Zayas-Bazán and his then-wife, her smiling face pressed against his chest. In another corner of the museum, he pointed to a collection of items that Brigade 2506 members kept from that era: metal bowls and plates, spoons, rosaries, and tattered books. Zayas-Bazán read Don Quixote while in prison.
After the invasion, several men were captured and forced into a crowded truck with no ventilation in the blistering heat. The episode was known as La Rastra de la Muerte, the “trailer truck of death,” because nine men of the dozens who were trapped died of asphyxiation. One exhibit focuses on what happened. “As oxygen dwindled,” the display reads, “some prisoners scraped open tiny holes in the walls and moved dying prisoners to them, an act which saved many.” The names of the men who died were listed, and Zayas-Bazán brushed his hand over those of three of his friends who had perished.
As I reported in March, Cuba is in the midst of the worst economic crisis ever to grip the island. Food is scarce, blackouts are constant, the medical infrastructure is collapsing, and inflation is astronomical. In the spring, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed he was in talks with the Trump administration regarding the island’s future, a few months after the US government imposed an oil blockade, further harming the struggling nation. In recent weeks, the situation in Cuba has worsened as the population grapples with water shortages in the midst of the summer’s heat.
The new museum is a reminder for the Cuban exile community of “what could have been” if the Bay of Pigs mission had succeeded, Andy Gomez, one of the leading scholars on Cuba, told me. Without any major changes in the country, he worries that the next generation of Cuban Americans will not travel there and eventually lose ties with the island. “As the Eduardo Zayas-Bazáns of the older generations pass away, that will be another experience that will be lost,” he told me. “It’s important to somehow continue to tell that story.”
And that is what the museum strives to do. Its executive director, Yuleisy Mena, teaches a course about the invasion at the local Florida International University. The museum has also invited teachers from the Miami-Dade County school district to visit. “We have to start getting the next generation ready to take on the baton,” Luis told me.
The Bay of Pigs veterans were among the first generation of Cubans to leave the island after Castro took power, and today about 200 of them are still alive. After Zayas-Bazán left his homeland more than six decades ago, he became chair of the Foreign Language Department at East Tennessee State University and co-authored Spanish language textbooks. In 1985, he became the first Cuban to lead the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.
After retiring in 1999, he moved back to Miami to be within the Cuban exile community in case democracy returned to the island nation. “I came thinking that there had to be a change in Cuba,” he told me. “I don’t want to return until I can speak my mind without having to worry, until I can go everywhere I want to and see whomever I want to. I refuse to go and be spied on.”
Despite a life filled with professional and personal successes in the US, “I think about Cuba every day,” Zayas-Bazán said.
For Brigade 2506 veterans like Zayas-Bazán and their families, the end of Cuba’s current government is more than half a century in the making. “I have never felt more optimistic about changes in Cuba than right now,” he told me, acknowledging that any changes may not happen in the near future with the ongoing disputes with Iran and the earthquake aftermath in Venezuela. “We, the Cuban people, have suffered so much in 67 years.”
