Cuban Missile Crisis 50 Years On
By Silvia Ayuso
HAVANA TIMES (dpa) — The first time US president John F Kennedy looked at the photographs, on October 16, 1962, he thought they looked like a “football field.”
However, his intelligence personnel quickly opened his eyes: the CIA was sure the photos showed ramps for SS-4, Russian mid-range missiles with nuclear capacity.
And they were on Cuba, just 140 kilometers off the US mainland, in a position to potentially destroy many of the United States’ cities, including Washington, in a matter of minutes.
The clock was approaching midday on that October Tuesday when Kennedy and the executive committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) went through the pictures taken on October 15 by one of the U2 spy planes that periodically flew over Cuba.
From then until late on October 27, every minute and every hour ticked down the path of history. The so-called Cuban Missile Crisis – 13 days of potential nuclear terror – marked the most dangerous moments of the Cold War, as the world stood on the brink of atomic holocaust.
“Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces,” Kennedy said later.
“Both sides showed that if the desire to avoid war is strong enough, even the most pressing dispute can be solved by compromise,” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev wrote on the issue.
But those wise-sounding assessments were hindsight, long after the fact.
In the thick of it, amidst all the messages, maneuvers, threats, commands and gestures that were made at a dizzying pace, experts agree that any one misstep could have, by itself, triggered nuclear war.
In the early days, until Kennedy addressed the nation on October 22, the crisis unraveled with a degree of secrecy that would be striking today, in the age of social networks and omnipresent cameras. Later, it became known that the ExComm then evaluated two options: an air raid or a maritime blockade.
Journalist Michael Dobbs describes just how close they came to the military option in his book One Minute to Midnight, one of the most detailed and best documented accounts of the event.
Almost until the last minute, Kennedy handled two drafts of his address to the nation. The one that was virtually discarded and was according to Dobbs to “remain locked away in the files for four decades,” started like this:
“With a heavy heart … I have ordered … military operations, with conventional weapons only, to remove a major nuclear weapons build-up from the soil of Cuba.”
Eventually, Kennedy opted for maritime blockade. However, that hardly prevented a series of potential triggers for a thermonuclear war from happening over the following days.
“The most dangerous moment in human history,” as Kennedy’s close aide, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, put it, came on October 27, 1962.
That “Black Saturday” started with Cuban forces bringing down a U2 plane and thus causing the death of US pilot Rudolf Anderson. Khrushchev was very annoyed, as he showed a day later in an exchange of messages with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Fortunately, Kennedy opted not to hit back. He was dismissing the voices of several generals who were hoping for a fight, as Kennedy’s brother and attorney general Robert Kennedy was to tell Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin later.
Almost at the same time, a Soviet B59 submarine that had lost contact with Moscow had to resurface due to a grenade that a US destroyer lobbed into Cuban waters. Its captain, Valentin Savitsky, wanted to launch the nuclear rocket it was carrying, but Soviet commander Vassily Arkhipov, who was also on board the submarine, vetoed that decision and convinced him to resurface.
Decades later, Thomas Blanton, director of the US National Security Archive, would call Arkhipov the man who “saved the world.”
A private message from Kennedy to Khrushchev, saying he was willing to remove the Jupiter missiles the United States had deployed in Turkey, managed to defuse the crisis late on October 27.
Without making that detail public, and to the great anger of a Castro who felt pushed aside in the negotiations, Khrushchev announced a day later that he had accepted the US offer not to invade Cuba in exchange for the Soviet Union’s removing its missiles from the island.
In his memoirs, Khrushchev wrote that “the episode ended in a triumph of common sense.” But even within his closest circle, people believed that they had come too close to the abyss.
“One mistake at the wrong time in October 1962, and all could have been lost,” said KGB official Nikolay Leonov.
“We must never get that close again. Next time, we would not be so lucky.”
I believe the promise was to not invade Cuba so as long as Castro is alive.
(Assassination attempts notwithstanding)
There were more parts to the agreement than are mentioned above, one in particular which the Cuban government never likes to mention. The quid-pro-quo is by now well known: Russian missiles in Cuba and American missiles in Turkey were to be removed and not replaced. The other item was a promise by the US never to invade Cuba nor to assist any other country or group in invading Cuba. To admit that clause would be to remove the “eternal enemy” from Castro’s arsenal of propaganda. Never the less, a US invasion of Cuba has been a dead issue since the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was Castro who wanted to start a nuclear war. In his Armageddon letter to Khrushchev, Fidel begged the Soviet leader to start a nuclear war with America. He was perfectly willing to sacrifice Cuba in such a war. Khrushchev was so horrified by this madman it was then that he decided to withdraw the Russian missiles from Cuba. It was not Kennedy’s alleged “steely resolve” that caused Khrushchev to back down. It was Castro’s recklessness.
“The American people, from the sweat of our brow, continue to foot the bill to defend freedom all over the
world.”
I cannot pronounce insults because I’m far too polite to do that. But as I type these words, just keep in mind that, as a proud Brazilian and Latin-American, remember well what happened in March 31, 1964 in my country and September 11, 1973 in Chile, and many other US interventions in the name of ‘freedom’ around the world that provoked exactly the opposite.
“Moreover, US Presidents must daily make decisions with the fate of mankind in the balance.”
This arrogance is… I have no words to describe it. So the ‘fate of mankind’ must rest within the will of the US interests. And for you it’s ‘natural’… You had better be glad my superego is doing it’s job, because my id and ego would probably banish me from ever posting again in this site.
‘Moses’ continues to be poster child for all that’s detested in the American Empire. What ‘Moses’ is for HT is what ‘Dubya’ was for the world – an eye-opener. Bush didn’t have enough sense to know the damage he did to his country’s reputation. Neither does ‘Moses’, apparently, who regularly wonders why people seem to hate the US. Ideologues never do know when to stop.
The paranoia ‘Moses’ professes for Fidel represents either sick obsession or more likely, another example of a technique the US commonly uses, a variation on the ‘straw man’ strategy. In this case, the straw man is made into a ‘bad man’ who then is used as an excuse to initiate wars and maintain 50-year blockades.
Alberto precisely nails down the significance of the Cuban missile crisis for Cubans. They were pawns in a game of power politics between two countries faced off against each other.
The lesson learned, of course is still valid – those without power can never trust those with it to do good by them. One of those two powers from crisis days is still playing power politics with Cuba, represented by its blockade. Thanks are owed to Sylvia for reminding us of history, and to Alberto for highlighting its significance for Cuba.
Noted but not emphasized in Sylvia’s account, or known at the time as the deal between the two power players was not revealed, we now know the responsibility for the crisis starting is placed squarely on the US government side when it arrogantly and provocatively first installed nuclear missiles within the same distance from Russia as the Cuban missiles were to the US mainland.
Russia simply followed with a ‘two can play that game’ response.
This would all be ancient history if the lesson stated by the KGB official was indeed learned: “We must never get that close again. Next time, we would not be so lucky.”
Stopping the 50-year plus blockade of Cuba would be a major sign that the US is finally coming off its power trip. Will humanity and common sense prevail, or will ‘Moses’?
Mr. Jones, I believe you are confusing bravery with arrogance. Fidel, steel-reinforced bunker intact, indeed appeared willing to sacrifice the millions of lives of his defenseless countrymen to assert his grandiose ego for a seat at the grown-ups table. Thank God the egos of President Kennedy and Premier Kruschev were not so likewise inflated. The superior military might of the US, then and now, comes at a price. The American people, from the sweat of our brow, continue to foot the bill to defend freedom all over the world. Moreover, US Presidents must daily make decisions with the fate of mankind in the balance. When the toughest thing one has to do all day is decide whether or not to write a ¨Refleciones¨ regarding moringa or yoga, how can you compare?
This event demonstrates Moses, how powerful countries, no matter what they call their political, social or religious arrangements, still disregards the most basic interest of those they deem inferior.
Even the Soviet Union with its proclaimed brotherhood in those dire moments, failed to include Cuba and its people into this crucial decision. This was no different, when the Spain was defeated in the so called Spanish American War -a skirmish with its turkey shoot of the Spanish Navy-, that 30 years of the Cuban people struggle against the Spanish occupying forces, a legion of dead and wounded on both sides, a total destruction of our country, was ignored and reduced to the US meeting with a demoralized Spanish government, to demand they relinquish the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba for all legal purposes, turning the United States overnight into an empire.
What no one can deny, irrespective of their political inclination, was Cuba’s courageous determination to stand firm against hundreds of nuclear weapons pointing to our tiny country and a heavily re-enforced GITMO, ready to wipe the island off the face of the map, if it did not raise its hands, go on its knees and plead for forgiveness to Uncle Sam.
Like it or not, that is why history have dedicated pages to Fidel Castro and those who stood by him in such crucial moments and another, for those who sided with those willing to incinerate 6 millions Cubans for daring to resist.
Fidel felt pushed aside? How do you enter negociations with nothing to negotiate? What more then empty rhetoric did Fidel possess in 1962? And now, 50 years later, what more can he really offer?