Cuban Missile crisis and Castro
Uploaded by Kerrytom on Aug 10, 2013
The Cuban Missile Crisis is widely considered as the closest the world has come to nuclear war. Former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, called it “the most dangerous crisis the world has ever seen, the only time when the nuclear superpowers came ‘eyeball to eyeball’.” Over the years many people have analysed the causes the crisis, however most of the scholarship has regarded it as a conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, while the Cuban aspect has been pushed aside as a lesser involvement. However if one is to delve more deeply into the subject, it becomes blatantly obvious that the Cuban involvement in the standoff is of more significance than others have tried to claim. The common themes about the crisis’s origins have ranged from the Soviets desire to counter balance its strategic inferiority, to Khrushchev using Cuba as a platform to negotiate with America in matters outside of Cuba, specifically Berlin. “in part to offset American superiority in ICBM’s in part to protect Cuba and in part to salvage what remained of his foreign policy models, Khrushchev moved in the spring of 1962 to position intermediate range missiles in Cuba.” While these are valid points, the aspect which shall be examined in this study, deals with the hypothesis that the crisis stemmed from Cuban fears of a US invasion of the island. There are many valid reasons why Fidel Castro would have feared an invasion, which will be dealt with in chronological order over the course of the study. The first stems from Castro’s revolution, and the United States decision that he was too dangerous a neighbour to leave to his own devises. This will then lead onto US covert attempts to disrupt Castro’s government, and destabilise Cuba. Following this, the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, is an extremely important incident which greatly contributed to Cuban fear and ultimately Soviet missiles being allowed on Cuban soil. The final aspect which needs close examination before the actual Cuban Missile Crisis took place in October 1962, was Operation Mongoose, a CIA undertaking which was “the covert effort engineered by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to disrupt the Cuban economy and stir unrest on the island.”
When discussing the notion that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the result of American attempts to quash the Cuban revolution, we must first examine the revolution and its...