San Antonio de los Baños was not built for Cuba. Wikipedia, drawing on the US Air Force Historical Research Agency, records that construction was finished in 1942, that US forces first used the field on 29 August 1942, and that US Army Air Forces aircraft arrived on 16 October 1942. German submarines were then sinking ships in the Caribbean, and the field flew anti-submarine patrols; later in the war it trained B-29 Superfortress crews, whose long runways explain the size of the base today.

The Americans left on 30 April 1946 and the field passed to the Cuban government. Under Fulgencio Batista, who took power in a coup in 1952, it carried his name: Wikipedia lists it as Batista Air Force Base from 1953 to 1959. When the regime fell on 1 January 1959 the revolutionary government inherited it with the rest of the air force.

Two days before the Bay of Pigs landing, eight B-26 bombers flown by Cuban exiles took off from Nicaragua in FAR markings to destroy Castro’s air force on the ground. San Antonio de los Baños was one of three targets, with Ciudad Libertad in Havana and Antonio Maceo at Santiago. Wikipedia credits the raiders with three FAR B-26s, one Sea Fury and one T-33 destroyed at San Antonio.

It was not enough. The John F. Kennedy Library’s summary is that the bombers "missed many of their targets and left most of Castro’s air force intact", and once the repainted aircraft were exposed as American-backed, President Kennedy cancelled a second strike. The surviving Sea Furies, B-26s and T-33s — the T-33s were Cuba’s only jets — attacked the landing fleet from 17 April, sinking the Rio Escondido and damaging the Houston. The brigade surrendered on 19 April.

The Soviet answer came in wooden crates. Rafael Lima, writing in Air & Space, describes them arriving at San Antonio in June 1961 with MiG-15s and MiG-19s inside. LAAHS gives the details: 20 MiG-15 fighters and four trainers arrived at the end of May, assembly began on 6 June 1961, and Enrique Carreras, a Bay of Pigs veteran, made the first flight by a Cuban pilot on 24 June. Eight MiG-19s followed in November 1961 and were assembled here in December; Cuban pilots found them "unstable, complex, problematic", and they were gone by 1966.

In 1962 Moscow sent a whole regiment. Wikipedia’s base article says the 32nd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment deployed its MiG-21F-13s here, serving in Cuba as the 213th regiment; LAAHS numbers it the 231st, and Lima places the MiG-21s at Santa Clara instead. During the October crisis San Antonio was the headquarters of the Cuban Revolutionary Air Force. On 26 October, by Lima’s account, Rafael del Pino sent a coded order to San Antonio, Santa Clara and Holguín: "Fire on the Indians". The Cuban pilots, without radar, scrambled only once in the crisis. The Soviet regiment left its aircraft to Cuba and went home in 1963.

The base remained the centre of Cuban fighter aviation through the Cold War. LAAHS records that 45 MiG-23BN fighter-bombers and two MiG-23UB trainers arrived in September 1978 and were stationed at San Antonio. English Wikipedia lists the Western Air Zone’s fighter regiments here and describes the base today as home to MiG-29 and MiG-23 fighters; the Cuban government does not publish its order of battle.

What the base can still put in the air is doubtful. FlightGlobal counted five Cuban MiG-29s in operation in 2022; its 2026 directory, which leaves out aircraft not in day-to-day use, lists no Cuban fighter at all. English Wikipedia’s inventory table marks every MiG-29, MiG-23 and MiG-21 as non-operational. The concrete laid for B-29s in 1942 now waits for aircraft that a fuel-starved country cannot fly.

The fleet’s best-known acts were political rather than military. Cuba’s MiG-29s, which English Wikipedia places at this base, include the MiG-29UB that shot down two Brothers to the Rescue Cessna 337s on 24 February 1996, killing four men; the ICAO investigation found the aircraft were destroyed in international airspace, while Cuba said they had repeatedly violated its airspace and been warned. The MiG-23BN, the type that arrived here in 1978, was also the aircraft in which Major Orestes Lorenzo Pérez defected to Key West on 20 March 1991; the base he took off from is not given in the sources.