The American military’s nuclear weapons program was progressing rapidly. Officials were wondering what to do with their stockpile of obsolete missiles. It was at the end of the 1950s, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the American president, and the Cold War was about to take a new turn. The American military already had nuclear warheads in West Germany, Italy, and Japan, aimed and ready to fire at the USSR. One more base would make their nuclear supremacy more complete. Their obsolete missiles were offered to Turkey along with NATO membership. For the world’s most secular and modern Islamic nation, this offer was a welcome invitation to take a step up in respectability. The Turks accepted the offer with pride. The missiles were installed along the north coast, aimed at Ukraine, then a part of the USSR, ready to strike the Eurasian superpower within less than thirty minutes at any given time.
Meanwhile in the Caribbean Sea, Fidel Castro was sailing a leaky boat called Granma through a hurricane, from the shore of Mexico to the southern coast of Cuba. Along with Che Guevara and a small crew of ragged guerillas, they arrived and overthrew the American-sponsored dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista with widespread support from the rural peasantry, underfed, undernourished, and under-educated by the capitalist pigs who ran their country. Initially the non-alligned Castro had no political ideology; he only sought power. He solicited support from both America and the Soviet Union and the Soviets offered to keep him in power permanently while the Americans pushed him to hold elections and preserve Cuba’s democracy. Castro chose to take sides with the former and Cuba became a communist dictatorship.
Due to longstanding treaty obligations, the American military was forbidden under international law to invade Cuba; instead they set up a clandestine operation under the newly sworn-in president John F. Kennedy. Exiled Cuban troops in southern Florida were recruited and trained for the Bay of Pigs, an exile invasion meant to overthrow the Castro regime and reclaim Cuba as an ally of the USA. The invasion was a miserable failure. Adding fuel to this fire was another clandestine conspiracy called Operation Mongoose. Headed by the president’s younger brother Robert Kennedy, acting in concert with the CLIA, the plan was to either assassinate Fidel Castro or start a rebellion against him. When looking at their schemes, one might conclude that the scriptwriter for The Three Stooges was orchestrating the events. These actions involved hiring mafia hitmen, sneaking chemicals into Castro’s drinking water that would make his beard fall off, passing him exploding cigars, and spiking his drink with LSD before a speech so that he would ramble on nonsensically in public. After Castro had given a nine hour, fully improvised speech at the United Nations while attendees either fell asleep or left the hall, you might wonder why they thought such a sabotage operation would be necessary or even effective. . The strangest plan in Operation Mongoose consisted of having airplanes drop leaflets all over Cuba announcing, in Spanish, the second coming of Jesus Christ.
In any case, the serious-minded Fidel Castro did not like these shenanigans. He wanted to get on with the business of building Cuba up as a modern, prosperous, and independent nation.
Overseas in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev saw this situation as an opportunity to make the USSR more powerful on the world stage. America was winning the nuclear arms race with better weaponry in greater quantity, much of which was loaded and ready to fire on the Russians within a moment’s notice. The imbalance of power was unmistakable. He hatched a plot to secretly deploy Soviet nuclear missiles to Cuba. This would even things out between the two fledgling empires in their respective hemispheres.. It would also give the communists a foothold from which they could spread further into Latin America. Khrushchev also had ambitions for incorporating West Berlin into East Berlin, joining the city once again, extending the Soviet reach into Europe; their missiles in the Caribbean could be a good bargaining chip in this endeavor. At first, Castro hesitated to accept Khrushchev’s offer; the last thing he wanted was a nuclear war with America. But as the CIA continued to try wrecking Cuba’s economy, he gave in to the pressure and soon a fleet of Soviet submarines was making its way across the Atlantic Ocean.
When the submarines reached their Caribbean harbors, Cuban revolutionaries and Soviet soldiers worked together unloading the freight. At first the Soviet grunts were surprised to see brown skinned Latinos and Afro-Caribbeans speaking Spanish; in an effort to maintain absolute secrecy, the Soviet commanders told them they were being mobilized in the Arctic circle. They also did not know what they were transporting until they began to unpack the cargo. There they found nuclear warheads and equipment for building missile launchers.
Aerial photography from U-2 spy planes flying over the island captured images of unusual activity. Storage bunkers, looking like airplane hangars, were being built in palm groves meant to conceal what they contained. These were brought to the attention of John F. Kennedy who was not overly concerned until a spy on the ground in Cuba reported seeing trucks driving through the rural, muddy towns in the middle of the night. Their beds were unusually long and covered with military grade canvas. The objects being transported were too long to be logs and were, in fact, so long that the drivers had to maneuver inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter, to navigate the narrow roads between buldings. The weight of the trucks were enough to get the wheels stuck in mud and considerable effort had to be made to get them up the steep hillsides.
After more U-2 spy plane missions and close inspection of the photographic findings, the CIA concluded that nuclear missiles were being installed in Cuba. What the photos revealed were a buildup of surface-to-surface and surface-to-air rockets with nuclear warheads in the process of assembly, mostly in Pinar del Rio. The crudely built launching systems were powerful enough to send missiles as far as Miami and Washington D.C.
On October 20, John F. Kennedy called a meeting with EXCOMM, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Present were Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and CIA director John McCone among others. They discussed plans including: doing nothing, diplomacy, air strikes, invasion, and a naval blockade. After some deliberation, the men of EXCOMM were mostly in favor of invading Cuba but the longer-term outcome was not so good. Aside from having the capability of a retaliatory nuclear strike on American soil, the Soviets also had the capability of dropping nuclear bombs on US allies in Europe and Asia. If China got involved, the outcome could be even worse. A nuclear war would, at best, kill off one-third of the world’s population and, at worst, lead to Mutually Assured Destruction, a situation that would rended the entire planet uninhabitable by humans. EXCOMM decided they had better move with more caution. In the end, they decided an initial blockade was the best option with diplomacy as being a back-up plan.
The American government was quickly offered assistance, both practical and logistical, from other nations in the region, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Trinidad and Tobago all offered naval vessels and assistance with intelligence if needed. America moved a navy ship to the border where the Caribbean Sea becomes the Atlantic Ocean. Military bases all across the American continent were put on high alert in case of attack or invasion. ICBM’s were prepped and aimed at Cuba. Anti-missile defense systems were set to blow-up any incoming nuclear bombs. Air force squadrons were mobilized to the Southeast. Overseas military bases were gotten ready for retaliatory attacks against the Soviet Union in case of a strike in the USA or any of its NATO allies.
On the afternoon of October 22, President Kennedy went on television and announced to the world that Cuba had a stockpile of nuclear weapons that were capable of reaching American soil. He announced his strategy of quarantining Cuba to prevent any further buildup of war materials, also assuring that supplies of food and medicine would be allowed through. He ended the speech on an ominous note by stating that America was ready to fight back militarily against either Cuba or the Soviet Union if any threats were made. The response from governments around the world was largely favorable to the USA but China said they were ready and willing to enter combat if a war were to break out. From the Vatican, Pope John Paul XXIII pleaded for peace and a solution to the problem through negotiation.
Nikita Khrushchev reacted to Kennedy’s speech with calm. After advising the whole world not to panic, he did, however, deliver a telegram to Kennedy, accusing America of aggression, stating that the blockade was an act of war. He explained that Cuba’s missiles were for defensive purposes only and warned that nothing bad would happen if America just stayed away. Khrushchev’s words were deliberately vague, so Kennedy and his cabinet were not sure how to take his statement at first.
On October 25, an unflagged tanker was spotted heading towards Cuba. Officials concluded it was likely from either Romania or the USSR. After chasing and stopping it, the American navy let it go through, concluding that it contained nothing of military significance.
The next morning, when EXCOMM met with Kennedy, they pressured him to either launch air strikes against Cuba or launch an invasion. The Soviets had shown no signs of backing down at this point. The hawks were getting too eager for war and Kennedy, along with Vice-President Johnson and his brother Bobby, were going over to the dove side. Kennedy had secretly sent an ABC journalist named John Scali to meet with a Russian agent named Aleksandr Fomin. They liaised in a hotel coffee shop late at night and floated the possibility of the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American promise not to invade the island nation.
Fidel Castro believed an air raid against Cuba was imminent. During a spontaneous rally in Havana, he made a speech telling his people that war was about to begin. He assured them that Soviet missiles were ready to be used when the attack came. When the uniformed Soviet soldiers were paraded through the streets, Cubans sang, danced, and chanted, praising them as liberators, heroes, and an army of messiahs brought there to fight off the American imperialists. With bottles of potent rum and vodka, the party went on all night. Shots of liquor were exchanged while language lessons in Spanish and Russian were traded and a whole breed of Slavic-Caribbean mulattoes were conceived in the early hours of the humid morning.
Events reached their maximum peak on October 27. Over the radio, Khrushchev addressed his nation, announcing that he was offering to withdraw the nuclear missiles from Cuba if America withdrew theirs from Turkey. The Turks were livid, swearing they would never give up their bombs, and the Americans were shocked since this went against the secret negotiations that were made just days before.
While the Americans were scrambling to decide how to react to this turn, a new Soviet tanker was spotted crossing the Atlantic. The military did not even know about the fleet of submarines that were heading in the same direction. Even worse, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Cuban military with the order having been given by Raul Castro, Fidel’s younger brother and commander of the Cuban armed forces. The American pilot died in the crash.
In response, the Americans announced they would soon be launching an all-out bombardment of Cuba in an air raid and a full-scale invasion by sea. The Castro brothers escalated their threat to bomb America. Soviet diplomats immediately contacted the American government. Russian generals immediately contacted their agents in Cuba. Khrushchev decided Fidel Castro was too hot-headed and tempestuous to have any control over Soviet weaponry, so he mandated that only Soviet officers were allowed to have any access at all to the missile launching technology. After passing this information on to the Americans, Kennedy agreed to a temporary halt of any military activities. The invasion was called off for as long as the Soviets agreed not to open fire on America. Later that day, the commanding officer of the Soviet tanker heading towards the Caribbean Sea got scared, disobeyed direct orders, turned the ship around, and went back in the direction of the USSR.
President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev then made direct contact with each other. Negotiations were quick. The USSR would withdraw all their missiles from Cuba. America would withdraw their missiles from Italy and Turkey along with a publicly declared promise not the invade Cuba and leave them free to conduct their internal governmental affairs without any interference from the US government. The Italians were more than happy to comply while the Turks felt cheated. They were, however, allowed to remain a member state of NATO.
Everybody was more or less happy, except maybe the Cubans. Fidel Castro woke up and turned on his radio to listen to the news being broadcast from Miami. When he heard about the deal negotiated between Khrushchev and Kennedy, he flew into a rage and punched the mirror in his bedroom; his screams could be heard at a long distance. The Soviets had snubbed him. Without even consulting him, they conducted diplomacy with the enemy behind his back and never even contacted him to give him the latest developments. Relations between Cuba and the USSR grew frigid from then on.
A couple days later, an American warship using sonar detectors located an approaching submarine. It was a Soviet U-boat carrying a nuclear torpedo. The crew had been submerged for too long and the submarine was running out of oxygen. When the American navy commanded them to surface, they had no choice other than committing collective suicide. When they reached the top of the ocean, they were greeted with American guns pointed right at them. If the Americans had fired, the Soviets would have launched the torpedo, an obvious act of aggression. US-Soviet negotiations would have been worthless then and World War III, along with a nuclear holocaust would have begun. The Soviet submariners made haste to surrender and nothing happened. Later that evening, the Americans invited the Soviets on board their ship for dinner and a party. The Russian sailors declined but they gathered on top of their U-boat while the American military band played jazz for them to hear. Friendly greetings and toasts of hard liquor were shared across the waters before the Soviets went back home.
Nikita Khrushchev was stripped of his position by the Russian Politburo two years after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Soviet officials decided it made him look weak, even when the whole world felt relieved with the retraction of the threat of nuclear war. Relations between the American and Soviet governments remained lukewarm but cordial in the aftermath. The now-famous Red Phones were set up so that leaders of both nations could contact one another directly, though insiders say they were mostly used to have casual conversations about sports and the weather rather than politics. Relations between America and Cuba have continued to stagnate, even though Cuba no longer poses a threat to anybody anywhere.
The Cold War had heated up then cooled off again, taking a strange turn after America and Russia agreed not to bomb each other. Both sides continued to escalate the arms race, working hard to build the biggest possible nuclear arsenal in an absurd attempt at deterrence. Considering that both countries ended up with enough nuclear bombs to destroy the entire world a hundred times over, possibly even more than that, one has to wonder about the sanity and rationality of the leaders at the tops of the world’s most powerful nations. They seem to be no different than cavemen arguing over who has the biggest club but with far deadlier consequences.
In the end, only one of the three national leaders in the Cuban Missile Crisis outlived the Cold War. Fidel Castro stepped down in 2006 and handed the presidency of Cuba over to his brother Raul; he died of old age ten years later. In the last years of hus life he still insisted on wearing his military uniform at all times of the day, even when eating his breakfast.
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