Fifty years ago, shortly before midnight on 16 April 1961, a group of some 1,500 Cuban exiles trained and financed by the CIA launched an ill-fated invasion of Cuba from the sea in the Bay of Pigs.
The plan was to overthrow Fidel Castro and his revolution.
Instead, it turned into a humiliating defeat which pushed Cuba firmly into the arms of the Soviet Union and has soured US-Cuban relations to this day.
The Bay of Pigs is a large isolated inlet on Cuba's southern coast.
There is little here apart from mosquitoes and a crocodile-infested swamp.
The beach at Playa Giron, a village with a small airstrip at the mouth of the Bay of Pigs, was the invaders' primary target. (To this day, it is referred to in Cuba as the Playa Giron invasion.)
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