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"The aggressor will be confronted heroically."
SIRS Decades
On October 14, 1962, two U.S. spy planes took photographs of Soviet scientists installing nuclear missile bases in Cuba. Accounts of the crisis that followed—which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war—have typically focused on the actions of government leaders in Washington and Moscow.
But what of the Cubans? Should the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis really be told without their perspective?
Explore these questions in a new activity from SIRS Decades.
Thanks to history textbooks, documentaries, and popular films, we know much of what went on in Washington and Moscow during those tense days in October 1962.
Here's a simplified chronology:
- U.S. spy planes photograph the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida.
- CIA director John McCone and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor recommend that U.S. forces invade the island.
- However, Under Secretary of State George Ball counsels caution, reasoning that since the Soviets already possess intercontinental nuclear missiles the Cuban installation doesn't really increase the nuclear threat to the United States.
- U.S. president John F. Kennedy sides with Ball and imposes a blockade around Cuba.
- Soviet ships sail agonizingly close to the blockade but then stop and turn around.
- Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev offers to remove the weapons if the United States ends the blockade and pledges not to invade Cuba.
- President Kennedy agrees to Khrushchev's demand, and the Soviets withdraw their weapons.
Throw in contradictory demands coming out of Moscow and fears by prominent U.S. senators that diplomacy would make the United States look weak, and you can see that the world did indeed come close to nuclear war.
Just how close, though, can be gauged only if you consider the Cuban role and, in particular, a cable to Khrushchev from Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Editorial cartoon satirizing Cuba's close relationship with the Soviets
(© Washington Post)
In this extraordinary missive, Castro promised that the Cuban people would defend their island heroically but urged Khrushchev, in the event of a U.S. invasion, to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States.
Activity
Read carefully Fidel Castro's one-page cable to his Soviet counterpart.
Then, with reference to the "John F. Kennedy and the Cold War" summary in the 1960s section and at least three more primary sources, answer the following two essential questions for critical thinking:
- Why did Castro recommend a nuclear strike against the United States when such a strike would inevitably provoke a retaliation in which Cuba would be wiped off the map?
- How, if at all, does consideration of the Cuban perspective change your understanding of U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War?
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