Historical Background
Timeline
| January 1, 1959 | Cuban revolution triumphs; Fidel Castro takes power. |
| May 1960 | Soviet Union and Cuba establish diplomatic relations; United States ends foreign aid to Cuba. |
| July 1960 | United States halts the import of Cuban sugar (80 percent of Cuban exports); Soviet Union agrees to import the sugar. |
| August 16, 1960 | United States plans to assassinate Fidel Castro through poisoned cigars. |
| December 19, 1960 | U.S. trade embargo begins. |
| January 3, 1961 | United States terminates diplomatic relations with Cuba. |
| April 17, 1961 | U.S. invasion at the Bay of Pigs of Cuba fails. |
| June 1961 | U.S. Jupiter missiles placed in Turkey. |
| February 1962 | United States enacts a complete economic embargo of Cuba. |
| April 1962 | Soviet Chairman Khrushchev proposes putting missiles in Cuba; Castro accepts. |
| July 27, 1962 | Castro announces Soviet military assistance to Cuba. |
| August 1962 | CIA director tells President Kennedy of concerns over missiles in Cuba; Senator Kenneth Keating warns U.S. Senate of missiles in Cuba and urges action. |
| September 1962 | Secret construction of missiles in Cuba by Soviets begins; Soviets threaten war with United States if Cuba is attacked. |
| October 14, 1962 | U.S. U-2 spy plane provides photographic evidence of Cuban missile sites. |
| October 15, 1962 | Analysts identify missile sites in U-2 photos, tell national security adviser. |
| October 16, 1962 | Kennedy is told of the photos; Executive Committee is convened; naval blockade and air strike options are presented. |
| October 17, 1962 | A second U-2 flight photographs longer-range SS-5 nuclear missiles in Cuba. |
| October 21, 1962 | Kennedy is informed that air strike would not guarantee complete destruction, decides on naval blockade. |
| October 22, 1962 | Kennedy addresses the nation and announces the naval blockade. |
| October 26, 1962 | Khrushchev offers to dismantle missile sites if the blockade is lifted and a pledge to never invade Cuba is made. |
| October 27, 1962 | U-2 spy plane is shot down, killing the pilot; Khrushchev demands Kennedy dismantle Jupiter missiles in Turkey. |
| October 28, 1962 | United States promises to never invade Cuba, lift blockade, and dismantle Jupiter missiles in exchange for the removal of Soviet weaponry from Cuba; crisis ends. |
| November 20, 1962 | Naval blockade is lifted. |
| December 1962 | Prisoners from the Bay of Pigs invasion are returned to the United States in exchange for medicine and food. |
| April 1963 | Jupiter missiles are completely removed from Turkey. |
The Cold War, at its core a struggle between “superpowers,” may seem at times simply to have been a contest between all-powerful enemies who knew each other well and made calculated moves, as if on a chess board. If true, how could this vision explain an event as chaotic as the Cuban missile crisis, described by the historian and presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesigner Jr. as “the most dangerous moment in human history” because it was the closest we have ever come to a nuclear war?
While it pitted Soviets against Americans, the Cuban missile crisis in fact resulted from a social revolution on the island of Cuba. Fidel Castro’s 1959 victory over a U.S.-backed dictator soon turned into a hostile relationship with Washington punctuated by the CIA-supported attempt to overthrow Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. The invasion failed, and President John F. Kennedy took responsibility for it, yet he did not promise to not try again to topple the Castro regime. In fact, after the failed invasion, John Kennedy and his brother Robert, the attorney general, signed off on Operation Mongoose, a program of covert sabotage of the Castro government. In 1962, therefore, Castro felt especially vulnerable.
Castro was also close to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, a man given to making public threats against the United States and who openly supported “wars of national liberation” in the developing world, such as Cuba’s. But for all his bluster, Khrushchev felt vulnerable because the United States and its allies had about 5,000 strategic nuclear warheads to Khrushchev’s 300. As of early 1962, fully operational U.S. missiles were even positioned near the Soviet border in Turkey, a Cold War ally. So in April 1962, Khrushchev came up with the idea — code named Operation Anadyr — to secretly ship forty offensive nuclear warheads, along with tens of thousands of Soviet military personnel, to Cuba, an island just ninety miles from the U.S. mainland. Missiles in Cuba, allowed under international law, served to defend the island and equalize the nuclear balance of power. Those forty warheads would have allowed the Soviets to destroy about 80 percent of the U.S. arsenal, in contrast to only 10 percent without the Cuban missiles.
Washington had worried since the beginning of the Cold War that a Communist country in the Americas would enter into a Soviet military alliance and thus bring dangerous instability to the nuclear balance of power. The United States had dominated the Western Hemisphere and “protected” it from extra-hemispheric powers since the nineteenth century. The Cold War, with its ideological contest between communism and capitalism, only increased Washington’s anxiety about the hemisphere.
Even before the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev were adversaries. In their one and only meeting, in Vienna in 1961, the Soviet leader lectured the young American president. Kennedy stood up poorly against the Soviet chairman and resented the bullying of Khrushchev, who seemed impervious to the storied Kennedy charm. Washington had repeatedly warned the Soviets about placing missiles in Cuba, with the Soviets responding that they had no intention of doing so.
Because it suspected Soviet deception, the U.S. government spied on Cuba using U-2 planes that took pictures from fourteen miles in the air. On October 14, 1962, one U-2’s cameras captured disturbing images of what could only be Soviet missiles and missile sites. The Soviets and Cubans had been caught, seemingly proving Kennedy’s judgment that Khrushchev was a “fucking liar.”* The Cuban missile crisis thus began.
When in 1962 Castro agreed to place on Cuban soil Soviet nuclear missiles capable of doing significant damage to the United States, leaders in the Cuban, Soviet, and U.S. governments expected very different reactions from each other. Tensions rose precipitously, almost triggering several times a civilization-ending nuclear exchange. If misperceptions led leaders into the crisis, could more accurate perceptions lead them out of it?
Map Used by U.S. Policymakers at October 16, 1962 Meeting about Cuban Missile Crisis
