October 1962: The "Missile" Crisis as Seen from Cuba (review)

Tomás Diez Acosta is well positioned to write this book. A 37-year veteran of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), since 1987 he has headed the Department of Military History at the Institute of Cuban History, Havana. He has published four books on Cuban military history, including one on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He has used Cuban and American archives and the Fidel Castro–Nikita Khrushchev 1962 letters that were published in 1990. Missing is the secret speech made by Fidel Castro in January1968 to members of the Central Committee that documented the high-handed way the Soviet Union treated the Cubans during the "October Crisis."

Diez conveys well the betrayal felt by the Cubans who were prepared to die to defend their national sovereignty and the worldwide socialist revolution (11–12, 101). The Soviets, who were not ready to die for Cuba and world socialism, left Cuba out of the decision to withdraw not only most of their troops, but the missiles and IL-28 jets. Instead of relating how "disillusionment and bitterness" (199) upset relations with the Soviets, and how the Soviets were ready to cut off aid to the Cubans by 1967–68 (as described by James Blight and Philip Brenner in Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis), Diez saves his ire for the United States.

Hence this book gives Castro's version of events, which is important for an American audience that has focused on reactions of the Soviets and the United States. In 1962 the Cubans were being harassed by John Kennedy's administration. In addition, Cuba had been expelled from the Organization of American States; was negotiating over the fate of the Cuban exiles taken prisoner in Cuba during a U.S.-backed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961; was facing a stepped-up U.S. trade embargo; and was being sabotaged and terrorized by Operation Mongoose, a covert operation against Cuba headed by Robert Kennedy. Soviet and Cuban intelligence took seriously the threat of an imminent U.S. invasion. This threat loomed larger during the "Caribbean Crisis" (as the Soviets called it) and led to Castro's accepting Soviet missiles, rocket launchers, and 40,000 troops on Cuban soil.

Soviet acquiescence to U.S. demands left Cuba vulnerable to a U.S. attack. Diez reasons that the United States did not invade because it was afraid of the casualties it would receive from the patriotic and mobilized Cuban masses (13– 14). U.S. actions are simplistically categorized as sheer imperialism. Diez does not understand U.S. perceptions of Cuban behavior in the cold war context. He forgets that the Soviet Union also was imperialist, as Castro charged in his 1968 speech, kept secret because Cuba depended on Soviet aid. In the end, both larger countries ignored Cuba, the fate of smaller nonnuclear countries when superpowers lock horns. For the Soviets, rapprochement with the United States took precedence over dying for the Cuban cause. From the beginning, the Soviets ignored Cuba, discarding Castro's advice to publicly announce the placement of missiles in Cuba. As a result, Cuba-U.S. relations remained tense, and the Torricelli and Helms-Burton acts tightened the trade embargo in 1992 and 1998 (57). However, Diez overlooks efforts by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to loosen the embargo, attempts that were rebuffed by Castro. He fails to note that Gerald Ford relaxed the trade embargo. Simultaneously ignoring the interests of the great powers in avoiding a nuclear confrontation, and praising the willingness of Castro to expose Cubans to a nuclear attack as a sacrifice for sovereignty and socialism, Diez provides an unbalanced and biased account of the Cuban Missile Crisis.