Cuban Missile Crisis

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Cuban Missile Crisis

On May 29, 1962, a high-ranking Soviet delegation, posing as an agricultural mission, but including the head of the Soviet Union's Raketnye voyska strategicheskogo naznacheniya (Strategic Rocket Forces) and two nuclear ballistic missile specialists, arrived in Havana to propose the installation of nuclear ballistic missiles on the island. Cuba agreed. Raul Castro and Che Guevara traveled to Moscow in early July to formalize the agreement. Nuclear missiles began arriving in Cuba secretly during the first half of September under a Moscow project code-named Operation Anadyr.

Several post-crisis accounts cite fears in both Moscow and Havana of a United States invasion of Cuba. They were provoked in part by U.S. activities surrounding Operation Mongoose, a post-Bay of Pigs covert effort by Washington aimed at removing Cuba's Fidel Castro, which was coupled with a Soviet desire to redress what was then a 17-to-1 nuclear missile imbalance in favor of the United States.

Rumors swirled for weeks of Soviet missiles in Cuba, but confirmation did not come until an American U2 surveillance flight over the island on October 14, 1962. By then, there were also 40,000 Soviet troops on the island. In a seventeen-minute, nationally televised October 22 speech, President John F. Kennedy cited "unmistakable evidence" of Soviet intermediate and long-range nuclear missiles and nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba. He also announced the imposition of a "strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment" headed for the island, warning the Soviet government that the United States will "regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union."

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev responded on October 27 in a message broadcast by Radio Moscow, in which he called for the dismantling of U.S. missile bases in Turkey in exchange for withdrawal of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Almost simultaneously, a Khrushchev letter to Kennedy arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow with essentially the same message.

The basic agreement resolving the crisis called for removal of the Soviet missiles in Cuba under United Nations supervision while promising removal of the naval quarantine and a pledge by the Kennedy administration not to invade Cuba. While withdrawing the Jupiter missiles from Turkey was not a quid pro quo for withdrawing the Soviet missiles from Cuba, it was part of the discussions for settlement of the missile crisis. The settlement made no mention of withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey, but that obviously was an unspoken part of the agreement, and the missiles were withdrawn within six months.

A new message from Khrushchev, broadcast over Radio Moscow on October 28, effectively terminated the crisis. In it, he said "the Soviet government, in addition to previously issued instructions on the cessation of further work at the building sites for the weapons, has issued a new order on the dismantling of the weapons which you describe as 'offensive,' and their crating and return to the Soviet Union."

An angry and recalcitrant Castro refused to allow on-site inspections of the missile removal from Cuba, which, as a result, was limited to aerial surveillance.

Although never formalized with a written agreement—and kept secret for many years—Kennedy's no-invasion pledge and its post-missile crisis implications continue to be apparent in the early twenty-first century, both in U.S. policy towards the island and the fact that Cuba remains under Castro's control nearly a half-century later.

There are those who argued that the no-invasion agreement was rendered invalid by Castro's refusal to allow on-site inspections to assure removal of the missiles. While the validity of that argument has never been tested, President Nixon reaffirmed the no-invasion pledge the early 1970s, when it appeared the Soviets might be building a submarine base at Cienfuegos, on Cuba's south coast.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bohling, Don. The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations against Cuba 1959–1965. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005.

Blight, James G., Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch. Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

Brugioni, Dino A. Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Robert F. McCort. New York: Random House, 1991.

Chang, Laurence, and Peter Kornbluh, eds. The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader. New York: New Press, 1992.

Frankel, Max. High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004.

Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Timothy Nafatli. One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964. New York: Norton, 1997.

Gribkov, Anatoli I., and William Y. Smith. Operation Anadyr: U.S. and Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Alfred Friendly Jr. Chicago: Edition Q, 1994.

Jarman, Robert L., and Jane Priestland. British Archives on the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962. London: Archival Publications International, 2001.

Lechuga, Carlos. Cuba and the Missile Crisis, trans. Mary Todd. Melbourne, Australia, and New York: Ocean Press, 2001.

May, Ernest R., and Philip D. Zelikow, eds. The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997.

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, ed. Mary S. McAuliffe. Washington, DC: History Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, 1992.

U.S. Department of State. Office of the Historian. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 11: Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996.

Michael A. Palushin

Don Bohning

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture