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9 The Kennedy-Castro Years David A. Welch With less than 0.2 percent of the earth’s population, and occupying less than 0.1 percent of its landmass, Cuba rarely dominates the headlines. Yet in the fall of 1962, Cuba was the most important place in the world. Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev’s attempt to sneak strategic nuclear missiles into Cuba caught U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy off guard and precipitated the most serious international crisis in human history. For six days and nights the world watched with bated breath as Kennedy and Khrushchev stood eyeball to eyeball. A single mistake, miscalculation, or misstep could easily have triggered a global thermonuclear war with the potential to kill more people within hours, minutes, or days than had died in both world wars combined.1 Thanks to the willingness and ability of Kennedy and Khrushchev to learn on the job, the world escaped nuclear disaster in 1962. What they learned was that it was their own errors that had led them to the brink. Primed not to err further, they became acutely sensitive to the dangers of misperceptions, misjudgments, accidents, inadvertence, and breakdowns in command and control. Because of this, they managed to find a peaceful way out. The Cuban Missile Crisis, in other words, was a profound learning experience for both—a lesson in humility as much as anything else. Ironically, the lessons largely failed to stick. Kennedy died in Dallas the following year; Khrushchev’s colleagues forced him from office the year after that. None of their successors internalized the values of circumspection , empathy, and humility that Kennedy and Khrushchev had come to appreciate so profoundly by staring down what Theodore Sorensen called “the gun barrel of nuclear war.”2 Cuban president Fidel Castro learned lessons, too. They were not, however , lessons in circumspection, empathy, or humility. Instead, Castro The Kennedy-Castro Years · 185 learned a version of Palmerston’s dictum: that Cuba has no permanent friends, merely permanent interests. In this chapter I argue that the Cuban Missile Crisis was a microcosm of U.S.-Cuban relations during the Kennedy years as a whole. During this period , there were ample opportunities to learn. Leaders did manage to learn a number of useful and important lessons that could have been turned to mutual advantage, and indeed were turned to mutual advantage for at least some time; but they missed others, and the limited, positive lessons that they did learn had tragically limited traction. Politics, personality, and happenstance conspired to prevent much in the way of progress, with the result that the Kennedy years ended more or less as they began: with the United States and Cuba neither willing nor able to reach a modus vivendi based on mutual respect. The story of U.S.-Cuban relations during the Kennedy years, in short, is largely a story of missed opportunity. A Novice President Confronts a Novel Problem On January 20, 1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the second-youngest man to be sworn in as president of the United States (after Theodore Roosevelt), and the youngest ever elected to the office. Though he had served as a congressman for six years and a senator for eight, he had to confront both a reputation for inexperience and nagging doubts about his judgment. While charges of inexperience were not well founded (Kennedy had as much political experience as many incoming presidents), they were perhaps understandable given that his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been a two-term president who in World War II had commanded all Allied forces in Europe while Kennedy had commanded a mere PT boat. Kennedy’s opponent in the 1960 presidential election, Richard M. Nixon, had already served in the White House for eight years, as Eisenhower’s vice president. Doubts about Kennedy’s judgment may also have been unwarranted , but were even harder to dispel: pundits found it difficult to discern a consistent or principled pattern in his legislative record, and he was known to be something of a playboy.3 His youth was undeniable. This, perhaps more than anything else, represented the real obstacle to his being taken seriously. Kennedy’s counterpart in Cuba—Fidel Castro—shared many of the same features, including youth, charisma, and a Catholic upbringing and training. But these were incidental traits, not dispositional ones.4 On the latter score Castro had much more in common with Khrushchev than with [18.191.240.243] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 16:06 GMT...

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