In a dramatic race against time, the Aleksandrovsk just managed to put in at the Cuban harbor of La Isabela. At 10.32, President Kennedy received news that six other Soviet freighters, four of them carrying R-14 booster rockets, had heaved to upon reaching the blockade line 500 miles off the Cuban coast – a line patrolled by 63 ships of the US navy. After many anxious moments, the White House finally heard with relief that a total of 14 Soviet ships had turned around; the blockade was beginning to take effect. There was still no sign, however, that the missiles already in Cuba were about to be removed – on the contrary, the Soviets were working flat out to get the launch pads finished. The US general staff began cautiously to prepare for a landing. Fidel Castro, on the basis of reports from his secret service, was convinced that air raids and an American landing were to be expected on October 29 or 30.
On Friday, October 26, at one in the morning, he dragged Soviet ambassador Alekseev out of bed and, in a state of nervous excitement, told him that the odds were 20:1 in favor of a US invasion within the next three days. Over beer and sausages he eventually dictated a letter to Khrushchev tersely setting out his “personal view” of the situation. It took quite a while, for he was not satisfied until the tenth draft of the letter. Yet the crucial passage, stylistically awkward and convoluted, is still not easy to interpret. “Dear Comrade Khrushchev,” he writes at the point in question, “if… the imperialists invade Cuba to occupy it at last, an aggressive policy of this kind represents such a great danger for mankind that after such a deed the Soviet Union should never permit circumstances to arise in which the imperialists might carry out a nuclear first strike against it.” A US invasion of Cuba, he continues, would be “the time to eliminate such a danger once and for all, through an act of legitimate defense. Hard and terrible this solution would be, but there would be no other.”130
The Soviets were puzzled. “At the beginning I could not understand what he meant by his complicated phrases,” Alekseev later reported to Moscow. Finally he asked Castro point blank: “Do you wish to say that we should be the first to launch a nuclear strike on the enemy?” Castro then replied: “No. I don’t want to say that directly, but under certain circumstances, we must not wait to experience the perfidy of the imperialists, letting them initiate the first strike and deciding that Cuba should be wiped off the face of the earth.”131 Alekseev’s interpretation was that, in Castro’s view, the Soviet Union should answer a US invasion of Cuba with a devastating nuclear first strike against the United States.
It was as if Castro had been prepared to avenge the violent demise of his revolution with the end of the world. All of his attempts over the years to explain away those sentences, or simply to blame errors of communication between Havana and Moscow or of translation between Spanish and Russian, have taken nothing away from their explosive nature.
Khrushchev certainly understood the content of Castro’s letter in the same way that Ambassador Alekseev had done, but it was only on October 30 that he dealt with the matter in a long reply. In the manner of a paternal friend, the veteran of the Second World War gave his temperamental “foster-child” in Havana a lesson in world war and annihilation, writing:
In your telex message, you suggested that we should be the first to carry out a nuclear strike against the enemy’s country. Naturally you must realize what that would have led to. It would have been not just a strike but the prelude to a thermonuclear world war. Dear Comrade Fidel, I consider your suggestion wrong, although I understand your motivation.… In such an event, the United States would doubtless have suffered huge losses, but the Soviet Union and the whole socialist camp would also have suffered a great deal.… Above all, Cuba would have been the first to burn in the fire of war.… We struggle against imperialism not in order to die but to make full use of our possibilities, so that in this struggle we win more than we lose and achieve the victory of communism.132
Castro did not want to let matters stand like that in the historical record. The next day, in another letter to Khrushchev, he conceded:
I may have tried to say too much in too few lines. We were aware that in the event of a thermonuclear war we would be wiped out.… I did not mean to suggest, Comrade Khrushchev, that the USSR should have been the aggressor, because that would have been more than wrong, it would in my view have been immoral and disgraceful; … I meant to say that, after imperialism had attacked Cuba, the USSR should act without hesitation and never commit the mistake of giving the enemy the opportunity to carry out a nuclear first strike against it.133
Castro’s blood pressure seems to have been peaking. The next day, after US reconnaissance aircraft had crossed Cuba at treetop height, he instructed his 50 air defense units to fire without warning on any American plane entering Cuban air space. He also ordered landmines to be laid in the area around Guantánamo.
Meanwhile, Khrushchev had signaled to Kennedy his willingness to make concessions, leaving Castro more or less in the dark. “We have to get these missiles out of there, before the real fire starts,” he is supposed to have told his former speech writer Fyodor Burlatsky.134 In a long letter to the US President, which was handed to the American embassy in Moscow at 9 a.m. on October 26, the Kremlin leader agreed that Soviet ships bound for Cuba would no longer carry any weapons, if the United States declared that it would neither itself mount an invasion of Cuba nor support an invasion by a third party. “Then the necessity for the presence of our military specialists in Cuba would disappear.”135 This formulation indicated that the Soviets were willing to remove the missiles; for, if the specialists left and took the “ignition keys” with them, the missiles themselves would become useless. When Kennedy had the translation of this letter in his hands, however, in the late morning of October 26, all systems were in place for the 24 SS-4 medium-range missiles based in Cuba. The actual warheads were kept in bunkers under strict supervision, but three and a half hours were all it would take to mount them and make the missiles ready for launching.
The next day, evidently under pressure from others in the Soviet leadership, Khrushchev sent a second letter to President Kennedy in which he introduced the idea of a package deal: Soviet offensive weapons would be withdrawn from Cuba in return for the removal of American Jupiter medium-range missiles from Turkey.136 Unable and unwilling to become drawn, at least publicly, into missile-bargaining of this kind, Kennedy discussed the matter out with his team of advisers and decided to accept only the first offer of October 26. The key passage of his reply to Khrushchev stated that the United States would lift the quarantine and renounce an invasion of Cuba, as soon as the nuclear weapons had been removed under UN supervision and the Soviet Union had given assurances that it would not install such weapons in Cuba in the future. Privately, however, Kennedy also placed the future of the Jupiter missiles in question – so as not to weaken Khrushchev still further in relation to his comrades. That same evening, he had his brother Robert give an oral undertaking to the Soviet ambassador, Dobrynin, that the Jupiters would be withdrawn within five months.
While Washington and Moscow were preparing to settle matters over Castro’s head, the missile crisis suddenly entered another critical phase. At 10.22, in line with Castro’s orders as supreme commander, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Banes in eastern Cuba by a Soviet ground-to-air missile. This incident, in which the pilot, Captain Rudolf Anderson Jr, lost his life, threatened to upset everything that had already been achieved. But Kennedy resisted pressure from the Pentagon to hit straight back.
At nine o’clock the next morning, Sunday, October 28, Khrushchev’s reply came in over several pages. The Soviet premier made it officially known that the missiles would be removed from Cuba and agreed to UN monitoring of the process.137 The “Executive Committee” received the message with jubilation, while hotheads on the Pentagon general staff doubted its authenticity and advised that, unless there was “irrefutable proof” that the missiles were being dismantled, the president should still order air attacks on t
he missile bases the next day, as well as an invasion of Cuba.138
In a letter to Castro that same day, Khrushchev tried to explain his missile decision as a quid pro quo for the Americans’ renunciation of an invasion of Cuba. As if in awe of the Cuban leader’s temperament, he implored him not to let himself be “carried away with emotion,” adding “friendly advice” to show “patience, steadfastness and once more steadfastness” and to stop shooting at American planes.139
In his immediate reply, Castro defended himself by pointing out that there had been fears of an American air attack, but he also remarked that he had not wanted to sit idly by, “with limited weapons,” while enemy aircraft carried out a surprise attack. In any event, Castro suspended his order to shoot down reconnaissance aircraft, but also made it abundantly clear that “we reject in principle any inspection of our territory.”140 This placed Khrushchev in a very awkward position and jeopardized his agreement with the Americans.
The tone of Castro’s letter of October 28 to the Soviet leader was cool and composed. But in reality the Máximo Líder was boiling with rage, because no one had even consulted him during the decisive phase of the missile crisis; he had had to pick up the spectacular news from radio and press agency reports. “Son of a bitch! Bastard! Arsehole!” this is how Franqui remembers him ranting against Khrushchev. “He went on cursing, beating even his own record for curses.”141 In his eyes, all that Khrushchev had won was a minimal concession on Kennedy’s part; much more could have been got out of it for Cuba and the Soviet Union. And yet, Castro knew only that part of the superpower agreement which concerned Cuba; he was not told anything about the American promise to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, which was important in shoring up Khrushchev’s weakened position within the Soviet leadership. He would first hear of this only the following spring, after the Jupiters had actually been removed.
Scarcely had the Soviet–American agreement of October 28 been made public when Castro demanded that it be revised in line with five points that went far beyond mere renunciation of a military invasion. These were: (1) lifting of the economic blockade imposed in February; (2) cessation of the acts of subversion and sabotage by Americans and their counter-revolutionary “mercenaries” inside Cuba; (3) ending of the “acts of piracy” by Cuban exiles based in the United States and Puerto Rico; (4) an end to violations of Cuban air space and territorial waters by US aircraft and ships; and (5) return of the US naval base at Guantánamo in eastern Cuba.
But it was too late for improvements. When UN General Secretary Sithu U Thant arrived in Havana on October 30 to discuss UN monitoring of the Soviet missile withdrawal, he met a revolutionary leader in an “impossible and intractable mood,” “extremely bitter” about the Soviets, the Americans, and U Thant himself, whom he insulted as a “lackey of the imperialists.”142 At their second meeting, Castro became so abusive that U Thant broke off talks and flew back to New York filled with consternation. Castro was flatly refusing to allow UN monitoring of the missile withdrawal, on the grounds that it would constitute a violation of Cuban sovereignty. “Whoever tries to inspect Cuba,” he said, “must come in battle array.”143 On November 2, Khrushchev sent the Soviet deputy premier, Anastas Mikoyan, to calm Castro down – a task that led to his having to stay in Havana for almost three weeks. Meanwhile, the United States further demanded the withdrawal of the 42 Ilyushin-28 bombers on the island. Khrushchev reacted angrily, but in the end he was prepared to give way on this matter too. Castro, fearing that he would be left completely defenseless, refused to give his consent, but on November 16 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet again passed him by and approved the order to remove the bombers in the following weeks. At the same time, the issue of the missile inspections was solved without further reference to Castro, through the mechanism of aerial observation on the high seas.
On November 20, 1962, President Kennedy reported at an evening press conference that, with “all the nuclear weapons” now gone from Cuba, he was ordering an end to the quarantine.144 In fact, Kennedy was mistaken: there were still some hundred nuclear warheads on the island, the six atom bombs for the Ilyushin-28s, and the tactical nuclear warheads for the Lunas and the cruise missiles. The Americans appear to have known nothing of their presence on the island; Defense Secretary McNamara, for example, was completely taken aback when he learned of this 30 years later, at the 1992 “Havana Conference” on the crisis. Yet, on November 20, 1962, Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa had committed the blunder of informing Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, Carlos Lechuga, that their country’s security was not endangered by the Soviet–American agreement, because the tactical nuclear weapons were still in place and would have to be preserved at all costs. When a copy of this report arrived, via secret service channels, at the Soviet embassy in Havana and landed on the lingering Mikoyan’s desk, he grew worried and, without consulting Moscow, changed into reverse gear. “We have a law that prohibits the turning over of any nuclear weapons, including tactical weapons, to another country,” he explained to Castro. “The Americans do not know that there are tactical atomic weapons here, and we will take them back not because the US wants us to but of our own volition.”145 Khrushchev subsequently backed Mikoyan’s action, and so the remaining nuclear warheads were taken back to the Soviet Union.
More generally, Mikoyan was outspoken in his criticism of the Cuban leader: “What should not be lost sight of,” he reported to the Kremlin, “is the difficulty of Castro’s personality – his sharp pride.”146 “These are good people,” he further lamented in a letter to Khrushchev, “but of a difficult character, expansive, emotional, nervous, high-strung, quick to explode in anger, and unhealthily apt to concentrate on trivialities.”147 Khrushchev was beginning to have doubts about Castro – since his behavior during the missile crisis was “just shouting and unreasonable” – and even about the future of the Soviet–Cuban alliance: “Either they will cooperate,” he warned, “or we will recall our personnel.”148 Khrushchev instructed Mikoyan to make it clear to the Cuban leader how disillusioned they were growing in Moscow. “Cuba, which now does not want to confer with us, wants instead to lasso us, hoping that their actions will embroil us in a war with America. We do not intend to move in that direction.”149
Castro became so agitated that it evidently took a toll on his health. The Soviet Ambassador, Alekseev, learned from Castro’s doctors that during Mikoyan’s visit he had been on the verge of a physical and mental breakdown and had had to take several days off from his duties to recover.150 Nor had Mikoyan failed to hear of the scorn being directed at Khrushchev on the streets of Cuba: Nikita, mariquita, lo que se da no se quita! (“Nikita, you pansy, a gift is never taken back!”). Carlos Franqui’s paper, Revolución, ran a week-long series of articles about the treacherous Soviet Union – until Castro ordered a halt.
Despite the differences of opinion, Castro’s Cuba emerged from the October crisis more strongly tied than before to the Soviet Union. But, apart from the enormous economic and military aid that the Soviet Union and other socialist countries gave Cuba over the next 30 years, the relationship remained cool right up to the time when the USSR disappeared from the political map. It was a “marriage of convenience” which, for all the effusive gestures and brotherly kisses, involved only a material and no longer an emotional bond. Neither side was really happy with the other. Soviet personnel in Cuba led a ghettolike existence, respected but not liked by the local population, known as bolos (“cones” or “nitwits”) because of their ungainly appearance.
There has been much speculation about how close the world really was to the nuclear brink in October 1962. We can tell from Khrushchev’s memoirs what would have been the consequences of an American attack on Cuba: “The Americans knew that if Russian blood were shed in Cuba, American blood would surely be shed in Germany.”151
The horrific episode of the missiles was over by the end of 1962. The last Soviet ship carrying tactical nuclear warheads and Il-28 bombers lef
t for home at Christmas, together with just under 24,000 of the nearly 42,000 Soviet troops stationed in Cuba during the installation of the missiles; that still left roughly 18,000 men. In late-April 1963, it was the turn of the American Jupiter missiles in Turkey to be withdrawn.
Castro’s refusal to allow on-the-spot verification by UN observers meant that the US undertaking not to invade Cuba was never set down in writing. Nevertheless, both Kennedy and all subsequent US administrations have regarded it as a binding commitment, albeit with sometimes major reservations. Nor has there been any attempt of that kind in the years since the October crisis. “The exchanges [between Washington and Moscow] were sufficiently lengthy and detailed to constitute mutual assurances,” wrote Nixon’s security adviser and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, in his memoirs.152 He it was who, on August 7, 1970, finally confirmed the agreement in a diplomatic note to the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Washington. The White House therein noted with satisfaction that the Soviet Union had confirmed the validity of the 1962 agreements, which were defined “as prohibiting the emplacement of any offensive weapon of any kind or any offensive delivery system on Cuban territory.” “We reaffirmed that in return we would not use military force to bring about a change in the governmental structure of Cuba.”153
Three gamblers
In 1962, with Castro, Khrushchev, and Kennedy, the vagaries of history placed three political poker-players on the world stage, who each went to their limits of calculable risk in order to outplay the other two. Holding their breath in the spectator stands, the anxious peoples of the world watched the weeks-long trial of strength on the edge of the abyss. If the situation did not get completely out of control, this was due perhaps to each man’s ability to place himself in the other’s shoes, perhaps also to a mutual respect that helped them master emotions, personal vanity, and narcissistic disorders.
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