June 2008

           
      More has probably been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis than any other episode of the Cold War. Dozens of histories, memoirs, and scholarly tomes were thought to have squeezed the story dry after forty-five years of examination. But in a new book, One Minute to Midnight, Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs seizes on those tortured thirteen days in October 1962 as no one has before.

      Using interviews with American and Russian veterans of the superpower confrontation, recently declassified Kennedy-era documents, and obscure archival materials, Dobbs has written a gripping day-by-day account of the crisis that brought the world even closer to conflagration than previously thought. Most of his story, and the most startling revelations, are crowded into vivid descriptions of just two days late in the crisis --October 26 and October 27, the latter known as Black Saturday.

      Jack and Bobby Kennedy are depicted as more fallible, less heroic than their Camelot mythologizers have portrayed them. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, comes across as more calculating and decisive than had generally been believed. And Fidel Castro, though often portrayed as merely a pawn in a superpower contest of wills, was the long-term big winner. In terms of what was at stake for him and his regime, he could not have done much better.

      Never mind that Castro raged and sulked for many weeks after Khrushchev agreed to remove the medium and intermediate range nuclear missiles he had installed on the island. Fidel was humiliated when Khrushchev failed even to inform him of the decision, learning how the crisis was to end from an aide, Carlos Franqui, who had just heard it announced by Soviet media.

      Franqui asked Fidel, “what should we do about this news?”

      “What news?” Castro retorted. And Franqui then read the news bulletin to him and, as Dobbs writes, ”braced himself for an explosion.”

      Castro went on to retaliate with self-indulgent fury by defying the Americans, the Soviets, and the United Nations by refusing to allow on-site inspections. It would be more than another six months before he and his patient patron Khrushchev finally began to get their relations back to normal. At the time Castro did not appear to have emerged victorious.

      But as Dobbs writes, a little over a year later Kennedy was dead, murdered by a Fair Play for Cuba activist. And a year after that Khrushchev was gone too, sacked by successors who deplored his handling of the strategic showdown. Only Castro survived unscathed, in fact stronger than ever, guaranteed in power by the no invasion pledge Kennedy made to secure the removal of the missiles.

      Khrushchev always insisted he had placed the missiles in Cuba to defend the Cuban revolution against American aggression. In his own colorful phrase, he wanted above all to “protect the communist infant in its crib.” Dobb’s account of the crisis, and of the Kennedy brothers covert machinations to dethrone Castro before, and even during the Missile Crisis, demonstrate how central that motive was.

      Ironically too, Castro’s behavior on Black Saturday was decisive in causing Khrushchev early in the Moscow morning of October 28 to cut his losses and capitulate to Kennedy without achieving all of his key objectives. A crucial consideration for the beleaguered Soviet premier was his mounting concern that, as Dobbs notes, “Soviet commanders in Cuba were following Castro’s orders” and not those of their own commanders. An American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft had been shot down by a Soviet surface-to-air missile (SAM) late in the morning on Black Saturday and its pilot killed. Two missiles were fired from a battery near Banes, in eastern Cuba, the town where Fidel Castro had been married almost exactly fourteen years earlier.

      Dobbs, however, does not give Fidel sufficient credit for this first precipitously hostile act of the crisis. Castro himself told participants in a conference about the crisis in Havana in 1992 that “it’s still a mystery what led the Soviet (SAM base commander) . . . to issue the order to open fire. . . we couldn’t give them any orders, but we cannot say they were solely responsible. “ He meant that when he gave the orders the same morning to Cuban anti-aircraft batteries to open fire on low-flying American aircraft conducting reconnaissance and harassment sorties across the island, Soviet personnel were energized to follow suit. Khrushchev’s concern about his own generals losing control of their subordinates was not a fantasy. Castro told the 1992 conference:

      “These soldiers were all together. They had a common enemy. The firing started, and in basic spirit of solidarity, the Soviets decided to fire as well . . . I can add that Khrushchev for some time believed that we had shot down the (U-2) plane.”

      It was also early in the morning on Black Saturday that Castro composed what has been described as his Armageddon letter. Perhaps the most contemptible document produced anywhere and at any time during the nuclear age, Castro’s letter to Khrushchev recommended that a preemptive Soviet nuclear attack be launched against the United States if Cuba were attacked. Castro wrote:

      “I say this because the imperialists’ aggressiveness has become extremely dangerous, and if they do indeed perform an act so brutal . . . that would be the moment to eliminate that danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However hard and terrible the solution might be, there is no other."

      The existence of the letter was not revealed until 1989, by Khrushchev’s son Sergei. Furious denials by Soviet and Cuban authorities followed. But after the third volume of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs was published the following year, in which he discussed the letter, Cuban authorities reluctantly released the text. Castro ever since has done his best to put his own spin on what he wrote. But nothing he ever contemplated or resorted to through his long and violent revolutionary career even remotely compared to the barbarity of that apocalyptic message to Khrushchev.

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