Getchell Michelle - The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War

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Memorandum for McGeorge Bundy from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., April 10, 1961

In this memorandum, penned a mere week before the launch of Brigade 2506, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., special aide to U.S. president John F. Kennedy, warns of the potential consequences of the Bay of Pigs invasion. He observes that many people do not view Cuba as a national security threat to the United States, and cautions that international public opinion will refuse to countenance calculated aggression against a small nation in defiance both of treaty obligations and of the international standards we have repeatedly asserted against the Communist world. Schlesingers predictions proved prescient; in this memo he anticipates almost exactly what the reaction would be after evidence of U.S. involvement in the invasion of Cuba surfaced.

A great many people simply do not at this moment see that Cuba presents so grave and compelling a threat to our national security as to justify a course of action which much of the world will interpret as calculated aggression against a small nation in defiance both of treaty obligations and of the international standards we have repeatedly asserted against the Communist world . To say that the Russians are doing worse in Laos is true but irrelevant, since we profess to be acting according to higher motives and higher principles than the Russians. Because the {125} alleged threat to our national security will not seem to many people great enough to justify so flagrant a violation of our professed principles, these people will assume that our action is provoked by a threat to something other than our security. Given the mythology of our relationship to Latin America, they will assume that we are acting, not to protect our safety, but to protect our property and investments. In short, for many people the easiest explanation of our action will be as a reversion to economic imperialism of the pre-World War I, Platt Amendment, big-stick, gunboat-diplomacy kind . The Communists will next seek to use the alleged U.S. initiative to bolster the Marxist interpretation of history. They will portray it as an effort on the part of the greatest capitalist nation to punish a small country for its desire to achieve political and economic independence. Throughout the underdeveloped world, they will try to persuade local nationalists to identify Castros cause with their own struggles. There will be particular emphasis on Castro as the defender of the colored races against white imperialism . The underdeveloped countries will be urged in the United Nations to defend their own future freedom of action by defending Castro; we can expect to be placed on the defensive in the U.N. for some time and to be subjected to a series of harassing debates and resolutions. Ex-colonial nations everywhere will be called on to identify their own problems with those of Castro.

State Department White Paper , April 1961

In this State Department White Paper, Latin American opinion of Fidel Castros Cuba is analyzed. According to State Department officials, members of several of Latin Americas moderate democratic political parties fretted about the military buildup in Cuba, which they claimed was converting a brother country into an instrument of the cold war. This document suggests that {126} even before the missile crisis, some progressive reformists in Latin America were concerned about the regional impact of the Cuban Revolution. The White Paper also details the growing Soviet military presence in Cuba.