Central Intelligence Agency face-to-face briefing. The CIA hoped that Castro would bring about a friendly democratic government, and planned to curry his favor with money and guns. On December 11, 1959, a memo reached the DCI's desk recommending Castro's "elimination". Dulles replaced the word "elimination" with "removal", and set the wheels in motion. By mid-August 1960, Dick Bissell would seek, with the blessing of the CIA, to hire the Mafia to assassinate Castro. The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the CIA-sponsored paramilitary group Brigade 2506 on April 17, 1961. A counter-revolutionary military, trained and funded
Human rights in Cuba have relatively high representation in the country, with women holding 48.9% of the parliamentary seats in the Cuban National Assembly. The Cuban Foundation for Human Rights, directed by Juan Carlos González Leiva, reports torture of female prisoners in Cuba. About the torture in Cuba, in 2005 a group of culture personalities, including several Nobel Prize laureates, have signed an appeal on "The Guardian" in defense of Cuba, stating that "the government of the US has no moral authority to elect itself as the judge over human rights in Cuba, where there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture