CUBA-US: Lessons from the 1962 Missile Crisis

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Oct 14 2002 (IPS) - The 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war 40 years ago, left lessons for averting similar risks in the future, said old foes who were involved in the incident, who met over the weekend in the Cuban capital.

An interest in identifying and spelling out those lessons was one of the reasons that Robert McNamara, who served as United States secretary of defence from 1961 to 1968, accepted the invitation extended by the socialist government of Fidel Castro to take part in a conference that ended Sunday with visits to historic sites.

The conference was organised to analyse one of the most dramatic episodes of the Cold War, involving the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba.

Sitting across from Castro, who appeared comfortable and relaxed in the sober, dark suit that occasionally replaces his usual olive-drab fatigues, McNamara said at the opening of the conference Friday that an all-out catastrophe was barely deterred.

Most of President John F. Kennedy’s (1961-1963) advisers at the time recommended an airstrike against Cuba, although some believed that option should be put off as long as possible, McNamara said at a news briefing here.

Cuba would have ”disappeared,” and the scale of the disaster in the United States and the Soviet Union would have been vast, said McNamara, who added that he had learned something else from the episode: that it is necessary to prevent the unintentional errors committed by the military on the battlefield, which can cost hundreds or thousands of lives.

McNamara said he did not believe there could be any ”learning curve” with respect to nuclear weapons, which can wipe out entire nations due to a deadly combination of human error and nuclear arms, he warned at the closing ceremony late Saturday.

Although the former secretary of defence criticised the nuclear policies of Washington and Moscow, he clarified that he was not advocating the total elimination of such weapons. But he said the major powers and the rest of the nations in the world should agree to eliminate the risk of massive destruction by nuclear arms.

The missile crisis – which is known in Cuba as the October crisis – erupted in 1962 when Washington obtained evidence that Moscow had placed medium-range nuclear warheads on Cuban soil, capable of reaching a number of U.S. cities.

Just a few days earlier, Kennedy had received a flat denial from the Soviets that such weapons were being kept on the island.

The tension, which built up over two weeks, was finally defused when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the secretary-general of the Communist Party, agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba if the United States did the same with its nuclear warheads stationed in Turkey.

The agreement saved the world from nuclear war. But it annoyed Castro, because his government was completely left out of the talks and the decision-making.

Havana argued that the missiles should have been left on the island.

In the wake of the incident, ”there was an aftertaste of disappointment and bitterness over the poor political role that the Soviet Union played by yielding to all of the United States’ demands for putting an end to the conflict,” said Tomás Diez Acosta, a military historian and researcher at Cuba’s Institute of History.

In an article on the missile crisis, Diez Acosta wrote that after the bitter but instructive experience, the Cuban government ”never again trusted the capacity of the Soviet leadership to handle problems of that nature and scope.”

From the Cuban point of view, Moscow should have signed a mutual defence agreement with Havana and openly installed its missiles here, which would have radically changed the conditions in which the crisis broke out.

”We often fail to appropriately assess the developments that led up to the crisis. Actually, it was the responsibility of the two superpowers,” said Cuban Vice-President José Ramón Fernández, who organised the conference.

Fernández blamed the United States for its ”continual aggression towards Cuba,” and the Soviet Union for ”the way it handled the missile situation…through secrecy, which, when it was discovered, placed the Soviets in a very weak position.”

The preparations for the conference, which was similar to an earlier one held in Havana in 1992, were accompanied in Cuba by a barrage of media coverage and reports aimed at demonstrating that the missile crisis should be understood as part of a systematic U.S. policy of aggression, which emerged almost simultaneously with the 1959 triumph of the Cuban revolution.

To demonstrate that, the conference hosts presented declassified documents on U.S. plans, such as ”Operation Patty”, a CIA plan that Cuban security forces frustrated after arresting 159 people.

One of the declassified documents on Operation Patty referred to a plot for assassinating Raúl Castro, the president’s brother, as well as detailed plans for ”terrorist acts, sabotage and uprisings headed by U.S. officials,” who would provide large supplies of weapons.

That aborted plan was followed by Operation Mongoose, aimed at triggering the overthrow of the Castro government, and described by Fernández as the biggest plot organised by the United States ”against a sovereign country and government on this continent.”

That operation came after the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuban territory, and was to end with a ”direct invasion” by the United States.

The missile crisis ”marked a watershed in the hostile actions and attacks of all kinds staged by the U.S. government against Cuba from the very triumph of the revolution,” said Fernández.

He also pointed out that most research has focused on how the two superpowers acted at the time.

”I believe the fact that this conference is being organised in Cuba, the principal scenario of the crisis, should provide an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct the events of that time and bequeath to future generations the truth about what happened,” said Fernández.

Along with McNamara, former Kennedy administration advisers Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Woodwin and Theodore Sorensen participated in the conference, which took place behind closed doors.

Also attending were former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst Dino Brugioni, Kennedy family members, and academics from Harvard, Princeton and Brown universities.

Several former Soviet officials were also invited, including Dimitri Yazov, a former commander of a Russian military brigade stationed in Cuba, and Anatoli Gribkov, a representative of the Soviet Defence Ministry at the time.

On Sunday, the guests visited sites in the province of Pinar del Rio, 176 kms from Havana, where several of the R-12 missiles had been placed. They also toured the Fortaleza de la Cabaña, to the east of the Cuban capital, where they saw a model of a Soviet missile, similar to those deployed in Cuba.

CUBA-US: Lessons from the 1962 Missile Crisis

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Oct 14 2002 (IPS) - The 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war 40 years ago, left lessons for averting similar risks in the future, said old foes who were involved in the incident, who met over the weekend in the Cuban capital.
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