[Occupymendocino] Kennedy, Krushchev & Castro

[John]

>From The Nation magazine:

In October 1962, unprovoked and out of the blue, the Soviet Union (the bad
guys, the aggressors) precipitated a crisis with the United States (the good
guys, the victims) by attempting to install nuclear missiles in Cuba, (a
“parking lot” for the missiles), 90 miles from the shores of the United
States. Luckily, US intelligence discovered this provocative plan before its
completion—in fact, before any nuclear warheads had arrived in Cuba,
rendering their delivery vehicles (missiles, planes, and boats) useless. And
so, with fearless, finely calibrated coercion, President John F. Kennedy
compelled Nikita Khrushchev to back down and remove the missiles. Kennedy
stood strong; he stood tall; he did not compromise; and in just 13 days, he
secured an unequivocal victory for the United States over the Soviet Union.
Since Kennedy’s forces had overwhelming local military superiority in the
Western hemisphere, and global superiority in deliverable nuclear warheads
all over the world, the crisis was not as dangerous as some made it out to
be. Khrushchev had no choice. He had to capitulate or risk being destroyed
and he knew it, which is why he “blinked” and Kennedy didn’t. Kennedy and
Khrushchev rightly ignored the ranting of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, since
his views were irrelevant to both the deployment and removal of the
missiles. October 1962 was Kennedy’s finest hour, Khrushchev’s worst
humiliation, and Castro’s introduction into the high-stakes game that was
the Cold War, as played by the Big Boys from Washington and Moscow—a game in
which a small country like Cuba was merely a bit player.

Now you’ve met the enemy. 

Our research on the crisis over the past 30 years proves beyond a doubt that
everything in that paragraph is dead wrong! It never happened. 

What did happen? Here, also in one paragraph, is the truth about what made
the Cuban missile crisis the most dangerous crisis in recorded history: 

The crisis did not come out of the blue and last 13 days; US blindness
toward Cuba only made it seem that way. The crisis began 18 months earlier,
after the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Cuba, fearing an imminent
full-scale US invasion, asked Russia for defensive weapons. Russia began
providing nuclear weapons, and the superpower-sleepwalk toward Armageddon
began. The United States was not a victim of the deployment; its threats to
Cuba were an important cause of it. US intelligence assessments were
atrocious: They did not predict the deployment; they did not even confirm it
until the missiles in Cuba were almost ready to fire; and their conclusion
that warheads for the weapons probably never reached Cuba was dead wrong. In
all, 162 nuclear warheads were shipped, delivered, stored, and made ready to
fire by Soviet technicians in Cuba. While Kennedy courageously and
ingeniously resisted the many hawks in his administration urging him toward
war, he had no plan when the missiles were discovered and was shocked at the
deployment. Nobody won. Nobody lost. Nobody “blinked.” Once Kennedy and
Khrushchev realized they were losing control of the crisis, they worked
feverishly, collaboratively, and effectively to terminate it. But Moscow’s
and Washington’s dismissal of the Cuban perspective, leading to Cuban
outrage and provocative behavior, sent the crisis to within a hair’s breadth
of nuclear war. Far from being a bit player, Cuba became the hinge of the
world. Believing they were irrevocably doomed by an imminent US nuclear
attack on the island, Fidel Castro wrote to Khrushchev urging him to launch
an all-out nuclear attack on the United States ASAP, once the Americans
began invading the island. The Cubans, and their Russian comrades in Cuba,
prepared to nuke the US Guantánamo Bay naval base, and to use their
short-range nuclear weapons against the invading US forces. Had these
actions been carried out, a US nuclear response would likely have followed,
and Armageddon would have commenced then and there.

Every claim in this summary statement is backed by voluminous and
authoritative declassified documentation, oral testimony from top-ranking
leaders during the crisis, and by the careful analyses of scholars from many
disciplines! What it says happened, happened! 

 

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