Trump boasts about getting 'Bay of Pigs Award' – which doesn't exist

Attacking Joe Biden and seeking to exploit reports that his rival is struggling with Latino voters, Donald Trump boasted on Sunday of receiving “the highly honoured Bay of Pigs Award” from Cuban Americans in the battleground state of Florida.

Perhaps inevitably, and to the glee of the internet, 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.

In his tweet on Sunday, 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, the Associated Press reported, “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 on Sunday was the award in question.

Receiving the endorsement of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association, Trump said: “You were fighting for the values of freedom and liberty that unite us all. The same values that are at stake in our election.”