Michelle Getchell - The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War: A Short History with Documents

PASSAGES: KEY MOMENTS IN HISTORY

The Cuban Missile Crisis
and the Cold War

A Short History with Documents

PASSAGES: KEY MOMENTS IN HISTORY

The Cuban Missile Crisis
and the Cold War

A Short History with Documents

Michelle Getchell

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge

Copyright 2018 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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For further information, please address

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

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Cover design by Rick Todhunter

Interior design by Laura Clark

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Getchell, Michelle, author.

Title: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War : A Short History with Documents / Michelle Getchell.

Description: Indianapolis : Hackett Publishing Company, 2018. | Series: Passages: Key Moments in History | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018010516 | ISBN 9781624667411 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781624667428 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962Sources. | United StatesForeign relationsSoviet UnionSources. | Soviet UnionForeign relationsUnited StatesSources. | Cold War HistorySources. | World politics19451989Sources. | Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 19171963. | Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich, 18941971.

Classification: LCC E841 .G48 2018 | DDC 972.9106/4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010516

epub ISBN: 978-1-62466-760-2

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CONTENTS

The page numbers in curly braces {} correspond to the print edition of this title.

{vii}

{1}

On the morning of October 16, 1962, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy met with President John F. Kennedy to share some disturbing news. The previous day, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)the premier foreign intelligence service of the United Stateshad discovered evidence of construction sites on Cuban soil for the emplacement of medium-range ballistic missiles. During an overflight of Cuba, the pilot of a U-2 (an ultra-high altitude reconnaissance aircraft designed for intelligence gathering) had taken photographs of one of the construction sites in San Cristbal on the western side of the island. If the CIAs interpretation of the photographs was correct, it meant that nuclear weapons within range of targets in the mainland United States would soon be in the hands of avowed U.S. enemy Fidel Castro.

Castro had come to power on January 1, 1959, after waging a three-year guerrilla war against Cuban president Fulgencio Batista. While economic growth and standard of living had improved substantially under Batista, political freedoms were circumscribed and opponents of the regime were often imprisoned or worse. Though Castro was not initially a Marxist, his hostility to the United States, much of which was a response to a long history of U.S. political and military interventionism in Latin America, encouraged him to turn to the Soviet Union for support. Two of Castros closest advisers, his brother Ral, and Argentine doctor and revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, both considered themselves Marxist-Leninists. They were sympathetic to Soviet communism and implacably opposed to what they viewed as U.S. imperialism in Latin America.

Castro and his comrades in arms were unhappy not only with U.S. interventionism in Latin America and the Caribbean generally, but also with the history of the U.S.-Cuban relationship specifically. In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain for the declared purpose of {2} restoring peace to Cuba, where an anticolonial insurgency was threatening one of the few remaining vestiges of the decaying Spanish empire. The Spanish-American War, or War of 1898, was a relatively brief conflict in which the United States won a decisive victory after sinking the remnants of the Spanish naval fleet off the shores of Cuba and the Philippines. Although anti-imperialist sentiment ran high in the United States at the time, President William McKinley believed the Cubans and Filipinos incapable of self-government; consequently, he saw no viable alternative to imposing a measure of U.S. control over the former Spanish colonial territories.

Fidel Castro and other Cuban revolutionaries were dissatisfied not only with the quasi-colonial historical relationship between Cuba and the United States, but were also resentful of U.S. support for Batista. Batista had legitimately governed Cuba from 1940 to 1944 but had then seized power in a coup in March 1952 and established a form of dictatorial rule. Judging his regime illegitimate and corrupt, Castro and other like-minded compatriots attacked the Moncada Army Barracksthe second largest military garrison in Cubaon July 26, 1953. Many scholars view this date as the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. Though the band of rebels was soundly defeated and Castro put behind bars, in May 1955 he was released under a general amnesty. Claiming to follow in the footsteps of famed revolutionary Jos Mart, who had led the late nineteenth-century Cuban insurrection against Spain, Castro then began organizing the 26th of July Movement ( Movimiento 26 de Julio ), named after the date of the failed Moncada Barracks attack. During a period of exile in Mexico, Castro linked up with other revolutionaries and returned to Cuba, where they launched an insurrection based in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Finally, on December 31, 1958, as Castros 26th of July Movement forces marched into Havana, Batista fled the country.

{3} The Cuban Revolution was a watershed moment in the Cold Wara nearly half century of ideological, political, economic, and military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. After the global upheaval of the Second World War, the Western capitalist powers, headed by the United States, and the socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union, became rivals for the soul of mankind. The United States promoted a development model that championed individual political liberties and free-market capitalism, while the Soviets advocated a state-led transformation of society that sought to empower the working class and distribute resources equitably. Neither philosophy translated purely into practice. The U.S. federal government played a significant role in the economy, while the Soviet dream of a classless society faded into the reality of a hierarchical power structure based on the Communist Party. During the late 1950s, as the European imperial powers reluctantly jettisoned their colonies, the newly independent states of Africa and Asia grappled with the challenges of building their societies and economies. As the Cold War in Asia and Europe stalemated, these decolonizing and developing countries, known at the time as the Third World, became a battleground in the U.S.-Soviet competition.

Cuba was important for ideological, geopolitical, economic, and strategic reasons. Situated a mere ninety miles off the shores of the continental United States, Cuba was not only geographically adjacent, but was also economically entwined. The Western Hemisphere, moreover, was considered by both U.S. and Soviet leaders to be the backyard of the United States. U.S. cold warriors championed the ideal o f hemispheric solidarity, which envisioned the Western Hemisphere as a united front against communism, under the firm leadership of the United States. The Soviets had their own version of this idea. They called it geographical fatalism, and it maintained that the Latin American countries were not ripe for revolution due to their geographic proximity to, and economic dependence on, the United States. The Cuban Revolution shattered these illusions, provoking fear in Washington and optimism in Moscow.