Donald Trump boasted of receiving “the highly honoured Bay of Pigs award” from Cuban Americans in the battleground state of Florida.The funniest thing about it is that, no such award exists.
The Bay of Pigs invasion, in April 1961, saw a CIA-sponsored force of Cuban exiles attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro and his communist regime. The failure of the mission continues to haunt US-Cuban relations, even after Barack Obama sought to bring the nations closer together. Trump, whose company reportedly broke the Cuba trade embargo in 1998, has sought to reverse Obama’s policies.
He may have misremembered previous visits to a house in Little Havana, in Miami, which houses a Bay of Pigs museum and library and where survivors of Brigade 2506, the unit which carried out the invasion, gather to talk and remember. Trump visited in 1999, when he was flirting with a run for president on the Reform party ticket. He was given gifts, if not awards: a brigade pin and, “a plaque of the shoulder patch worn during the invasion”.
Trump visited the museum again in October 2016, receiving “a hand-painted Brigade 2506 shield” which his campaign insisted, was the award in question. Trump has a habit of claiming to have received awards and honours which do not exist or which he has never been given. Famously, the president has displayed a fake Time magazine cover at his golf clubs. He has also repeatedly claimed to have been named Man of the Year in Michigan, another battleground state, though one in which he trails Biden by 7.6%.
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