Overview: The man who returned to his native country with Che Guevara on a leaky tub, bringing communism to the Western Hemisphere with him. Fidel Castro was a thorn in every president’s side from Eisenhower, to Obama, turning Cuba into a potential launching pad for Soviet nuclear missiles. But his first and greatest test would be to repel an American-backed invasion at Playa Giron, a beach on the southern coast of Cuba at the mouth of an inlet called the Bay of Pigs.