Editor's Note

This issue begins with three articles that are connected, in one way or another, with Cuba's role in the Cold War, especially during and after the October 1962 missile crisis. The first article, by David Coleman, focuses on U.S. policymakers' assessments of the risks posed by Soviet short-range nuclear missiles during and after the Cuban missile crisis. Coleman shows that U.S. officials learned relatively early that Soviet Luna missiles and other tactical delivery vehicles were present in Cuba, and they knew that these types of delivery vehicles were usually deployed with nuclear warheads. Although U.S. intelligence analysts never firmly determined that nuclear warheads were on the island, they saw a number of indications suggesting that nuclear warheads had been brought there. Moreover, U.S. policymakers all assumed that the Luna and other tactical missiles would be nuclear-armed. The suggestion in the early 1990s by some former top aides to President John F. Kennedy, notably Robert McNamara, that they had been unaware of the presence of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba is at best misleading. Recently declassified evidence makes clear that key U.S. officials knew about the deployment of Soviet short-range missiles in Cuba and assumed that nuclear warheads were also on the island (as indeed they were). Coleman discusses how President Kennedy and other senior officials coped with the military risks and political fallout from the crisis. His article shows that, contrary to the depiction in many accounts and memoirs, the Cuban missile crisis extended well beyond its peak in October 1962 and never had a neat endpoint.

The second article, by Dominic Tierney, explores how moral analogies with Pearl Harbor were used by American policymakers during their secret, high-level deliberations in October 1962 after U-2 reconnaissance flights had detected Soviet medium-range missile bases under construction in Cuba. Tierney begins by discussing the general role of moral analogies in foreign policymaking, and he then focuses specifically on the use of the Pearl Harbor analogy during the Cuban missile crisis. This analogy was invoked by officials who worried about the consequences of a surprise attack against the Soviet missile bases. The recently declassified tapes of meetings of the Executive Committee (ExComm—the ad-hoc body set up by President Kennedy in mid-October 1962 to help him decide how to respond to the Soviet missile deployments) contravene the long-standing notion that Attorney General Robert Kennedy was the first to introduce the Pearl Harbor analogy into the discussions. (In reality, Robert Kennedy initially was one of the most vehement supporters of an immediate surprise attack against the missile sites.) The tapes also make clear that the Pearl Harbor analogy, when it came up during the ExComm's sessions, gave greater weight to the arguments of those who wanted to avert a surprise attack and was one of the factors that induced President Kennedy to proceed with a naval blockade of Cuba rather than immediate air strikes followed by a full-scale invasion. Tierney's discussion of the role of moral analogies in the Cuban missile crisis is a valuable supplement to the work of other scholars who have studied how U.S. policymakers relied on historical analogies when deciding what to do about Vietnam and other Cold War issues.

The third article, by Yinghong Cheng, traces the rocky course of Cuban-Chinese relations from 1959 to 1966. Even as Fidel Castro was seizing power in Cuba in 1959 and aligning his country with the Soviet Union, China was on the verge of breaking away from the Soviet bloc. By late 1959, the Sino-Soviet rift was deepening behind the scenes, and it flared into the open in the early 1960s. China's relations with Cuba, however, remained close for a considerable while after the emergence of the Sino-Soviet schism. Cheng traces the evolution of Chinese-Cuban relations through the mid-1960s, showing how the staunch friendship of the early 1960s gradually deteriorated and ended in an angry split. The Cuban leader Fidel Castro tried to remain on amicable terms with the Chinese leader Mao Zedong and even tried to mediate...