Fidel Castro Quotes

Giro'n is the Cuban name for the Bay of Pigs.

Several weeks later the U. S. blockaded Cuba in what became known as the Cuban missile crisis, to remove the Soviet offensive nuclear capability from Cuba.

McNamara stated that the Cuban Missile Crisis was more politically required than defense required. The Russians had nuclear missiles at the time that could reach the United States and didn’t really need missiles in Cuba to threaten America. Public opinion and the Republican Political doctrine persuaded President Kennedy that independent of safety and military factors, nuclear missiles in Cuba was a major political problem. See his comment to the President and the Other Officials dealing with the crises—{631968}.

When McNamara was itemizing the list of dangers with the Joint Chiefs’ Cuban invasion plan, McGeorge Bundy told the not to forget the possibility of a nuclear exchange. The Joint Chief’s plan and recommendation was to invade Cuba, which could have been accomplished with relative military ease they thought. However, they had not gone the next steps and had no planned responses to the various possible Russian responses. The Chiefs of Staff were senior battle hardened WWII and Korean War veterans whose tactical knowledge and leadership was as good as there was. However, none of the had any experience or training with the strategic aspects of military planning the way senior military officers did in the next generation of military leaders. The civilian leadership had to put the breaks on the Joint Chief’s notion of simplistic invading Cuba.

The occasion was the visit to Washington of French Minister M. Jean Letourneau. The French were fighting the communists in Vietnam and the U. S., not yet in the fight, promised material and political aid, but no military participation. It was almost a decade later that America sent its first military personnel to Vietnam. The West was persuaded that the French could handle the situation. When they were defeated, America and Britain assumed that it was the notorious military incompetence of the French that accounted for the situation rather than the competence and commitment of the Vietnamese Communists and their support of the majority of the people.

This editorial marked what most people agreed was the end of the Cold War.

Trieste was occupied by the British and Americans theoretically, but Tito’s Yugoslavian troops had done most of the WWII fighting and dying in the area and wanted control for the Russian Allies of which Tito was then one. There were frequent armed standoff’s of Anglo Americans and Yugoslav troops that could easily have evolved to full scale fighting. Nine months later, Tito broke with Stalin. An interesting historical fact is that Richard M. Nixon was one of the Congressional Delegation then visiting Trieste.

The immediate crisis had been averted and no more nuclear missiles would enter Cuba. But we had no leverage to get the few that were already there removed and it would be politically very difficult for the Kennedy administration to get the public to accept ANY nuclear missiles in Cuba. Hence, Stevenson’s statement. See {634554}. Neither side had great intercontinental ballistic missile capability at the time, and we had placed a large battery of missiles in Turkey very close to the Russian border. This gave the U. S. a major military advantage. We could deliver many more nuclear warheads to Russia than they could to the United States. The Russians with this proposal hoped to even the capability. The military advisers and the security and State Department advisors all thought that the U. S. should not give up its nuclear superiority. However, we had no international legal basis for denying the Cubans the right to locate any weapons on their soil, so to prevent the Communists from having nuclear missiles in Cuba we would have to use force which could easily escalate into a nuclear war. Kennedy and McCone both thought that since we had intercontinental ballistic missiles in production and coming on line and would not need the Turkey Missiles to strike all over Russia. So giving up our missile advantage for a short time would not expose us to any undue risk. The other advisors worried that the production of the ICBMs could be delayed—weapons systems were (and are) notoriously longer in production than estimated or planned. They also thought that the morale of the military and civilian population would suffer when they learned that we had given away our military advantage. There was a macho element in their thinking in that we would be giving in to intimidation and look like we were afraid to fight. Last, the political advisors thought that the right wing hawks would pillory the administration for its cowardice in allowing itself to be intimidated by the Russians. Their doctrine was that when faced with force, the Communists will always back down. In the final deal we agreed to remove our missiles from Turkey in 6 months and this would be done in complete secrecy and the Russians would keep the deal secret. That way, Kennedy got 6 more months of production which turned out to have been enough. The public would never know till years later and the Conservatives would not be able to publicly castigate Kennedy. Meanwhile, the conservatives would continue to believe that the Russians backed down in the face of force—the naval blockade as this was ‘proved’ their doctrine when the Russians had not backed down at all. The strategy and tactics of the Kennedy administration are still analyzed and argued about today with many Americans just realizing that we did not intimidate the Russians with force or the threat of force to remove their Cuban missiles.