Cuba Missile Crisis Quotes

When Khrushchev asked whether his brass hats would guarantee that keeping the missiles in Cuba would not bring about nuclear war, they looked at him, he later told Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, an informal emissary between Kennedy and Khrushchev, “as though I were out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor. So I said to myself, ‘To hell with these maniacs.’”6

Cuba in particular kept American presidents awake at night, as it would again in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The island sits just off Florida, giving it access to and potential control of the Florida Straits and the Yucatan Channel in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the exit and entry route for the port of New Orleans.

But there was even more that Khrushchev knew and Kennedy didn’t—secrets that Khrushchev had chosen not to reveal at the time and that remained unknown to any Americans (including me) for twenty-five years or more. First, that the number of Soviet troops116 in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included.

However, there have been close calls where we were extremely lucky that there was a human in the loop. On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, eleven U.S. Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph had cornered the Soviet submarine B-59 near Cuba, in international waters outside the U.S. “quarantine” area. What they didn’t know was that the temperature onboard had risen past 45°C (113°F) because the submarine’s batteries were running out and the air-conditioning had stopped. On the verge of carbon dioxide poisoning, many crew members had fainted. The crew had had no contact with Moscow for days and didn’t know whether World War III had already begun. Then the Americans started dropping small depth charges, which they had, unbeknownst to the crew, told Moscow were merely meant to force the sub to surface and leave. “We thought—that’s it—the end,” crew member V. P. Orlov recalled. “It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.” What the Americans also didn’t know was that the B-59 crew had a nuclear torpedo that they were authorized to launch without clearing it with Moscow. Indeed, Captain Savitski decided to launch the nuclear torpedo. Valentin Grigorievich, the torpedo officer, exclaimed: “We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not disgrace our navy!” Fortunately, the decision to launch had to be authorized by three officers on board, and one of them, Vasili Arkhipov, said no. It’s sobering that very few have heard of Arkhipov, although his decision may have averted World War III and been the single most valuable contribution to humanity in modern history.38 It’s also sobering to contemplate what might have happened had B-59 been an autonomous AI-controlled submarine with no humans in the loop.

The image of Che Guevara adorn the walls of students’ bedrooms and T-shirts the world over. Looking out over the head of the viewer he cuts a Christ-like figure. In fact, he was a murdering racist psychopath. A direct descendent of the last viceroy of Peru, he hated Black people and American Indians almost as much as gringos. Only pure-blooded Spaniards were good enough for him – despite his Irish blood He happily shot his own men in the back of the head for minor infractions. In Havana he summarily executed so many allies as well as enemies in the football stadium, Taliban-style, Fidel Castro had to beg him to stop. He helped establish labour camps in Cuba. A Stalinist, he backed the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Uprising An Argentinian, he played host to dictator Juan Perón. A hardline Communist, he back-channelled with President Kennedy. During the Cuban missile crisis he urged a pre-emptive strike against the US, though America’s retaliation would have wiped Cuba from the map. “The Cuban people are willing to sacrifice themselves,” he said. Did anyone ask them? He alienated the Cubans, the Russians and the Chinese in turn. The people of the Congo are suffering from his bungled intervention to this day. The Communist Party in Bolivia did not want him there. Nor did any of the other Communist parties in the surrounding countries. When he was captured, the only people that tried to rescue him were the CIA. Still, he takes a great photograph.

Hurricane Daisy delayed the continuing surveillance, however when they could resume flying on October 14th, the crystal-clear photos indicated that launch sites were being prepared for both mobile medium-sized missiles, and more extensive sites for the larger-sized ballistic missiles. Although the actual missiles were not yet in place, the CIA understood the enormity of the threat. Missiles that could reach 2,000 miles into the United States could not be ignored! With Cuba only 90 miles to the south of Key West, it posed an extreme threat to national security. On October 22, 1962, the discovery of these missiles was finally announced to the public, and a naval quarantine was implemented around Cuba. President Kennedy was careful not to call it a “blockade,” since use of the word would be considered an act of war! Regardless, U.S. warships were deployed that would intercept and board any ship heading to the island. Castro announced that Cuba had the right to defend itself from American aggression. He added that the decision to deploy missiles was a joint action on the part of both Cuba and the Soviet Union. Kennedy discounted Castro’s bluster but not the threat. The final decision to remove the missiles from Cuban soil would be between Khrushchev and Kennedy, without any Cuban involvement. Allowing Khrushchev to save face, Kennedy agreed to remove American missiles aimed at the Soviet Union from Italy and Turkey. It also included a commitment that the United States would not invade Cuba.

On October 26, 1963, Nikita Khrushchev contacted President Kennedy and offered to remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange for a promise that the United States would not invade the Island Nation. A day later on October 27th, Khrushchev sent a letter proposing that the Soviet Union would dismantle their missiles in Cuba, if the Americans reciprocated by removing their missile installations in Turkey. Although the cold war was far from over, both sides knowing how close they came from an all-out conflict, had a “hot line” installed between Washington and Moscow, hoping to prevent any similar situations in the future. The hot line is sometimes called the red telephone, even though it wasn’t even a telephone, nor was it red. The first connection was a teletype machine, after which a fax machine was used. In 1986, the hotline became a computer link and messages are now sent by email.

To smooth over Castro’s ruffled feathers; Khrushchev eventually wrote him a personal letter explaining his reasons for reaching an agreement with the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. In it, he also extended Castro an invitation to come and visit him in Moscow. The Cuban leader, feeling that this enhanced his international standing, set aside his resentments and swallowed his pride, knowing that his country would have to depend on the USSR for its many needs. He also understood that the ideology that brought his country to where it was had also created many divisions among its people. The United States, on which Cuba had depended on for so many years, was no longer an ally they could trade with, and the new friendship with a distant country created many of its own problems. Many of Cuba’s professional class had fled the country for the United States, when the companies they worked for became nationalized. The brain drain Cuba experienced was hard to replace, and most of those that had stayed, were not prepared to fill the more technical positions. The shelves were bare and people were becoming intolerant of the many domestic problems they were required to face.

The Cuban Missile Crisis. It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure.

While on his multi-year, orgiastic bender of speed and steroids, JFK ran the country with appropriate amounts of paranoia, unpredictability, and raging aggression. It’s not a surprise that Kennedy’s two years as president were so stuffed full of crises and scandals. That roided-up speed freak was in a rush, baby! Kennedy invaded Cuba, played nuclear chicken with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, maniacally tried to cripple the power of the CIA and the FBI, cooked up a top-secret operation to kill Castro, belly flopped into Vietnam, tried to topple Hoffa and the Teamsters, and went on a rampage against the same gangsters that stole the presidency for him — all at the same time.

Political issues were interlinked more closely than he had previously imagined. He had always thought that problems such as Berlin and Cuba were separate from each other and had little connection with such issues as civil rights and health care. But President Kennedy had been unable to deal with the Cuban missile crisis without thinking of the repercussions in Germany. And if he had failed to deal with Cuba, the imminent midterm elections would have crippled his domestic program, and made it impossible for him to pass a civil rights bill. Everything was connected.

Rusk was the only ExComm participant, other than the president, to persistently refer to the possibility that the crisis in Cuba could rapidly escalate to nuclear war.

Regan blamed President Kennedy for not saving Cuba when he had the chance: 'We have seen an American President walk all the way to the barricade in the Cuban Missile Crisis and lack the will to take the final step to make it successful.' Presumably, the 'final step' would have been an invasion to remove Fidel Castro.

For the most part, four-car self-propelled Budd railcars presently connect Santiago de Cuba with Havana on the Central line. The flagship of the system is a 12-coach train originally used between Paris and Amsterdam. Although buses competed with the railroad, they all became nationalized after the revolution. Attempting to prevent the decay of the Cuban system, British Rail helped during the 1960’s by supplying new locomotives. However, this slowed and eventually came to a halt after the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Eastern Bloc and countries that continued to be friendly with Cuba, such as Canada, Spain and Mexico, took over. During the past decade China, Iran and Venezuela became Cuba’s primary benefactors and suppliers. Cuba has had long-range plans to update and modernize its railroad system. These plans are presently being realized and the upgrading and modernizing of the country’s 26,000 miles of track and replacing older locomotives, including some steam engines, with powerful and modern diesel-fueled locomotives are becoming a reality. P

General Curtis E. LeMay, a legendary fighter pilot who’d implemented the carpet bombing of Japan during World War II. A notorious hawk, LeMay had served as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d tried to organize a coup against Kennedy among the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he wanted to force the military to flout the president’s orders and bomb the Soviet missile bases they’d found in Cuba.

First, that the number of Soviet troops116 in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included. So

As President Kennedy told the ExComm when the perilous naval quarantine around Cuba was about to be implemented, “What we are doing is throwing down a card on the table in a game which we don’t know the ending of.

My classmates stood and cheered when President Kennedy’s assassination was announced over the school’s intercom. I was in the eleventh grade in Helena, Arkansas in 1963. Even then, the cheers seemed rehearsed. How could teenagers express such rank emotion from something so vile and tragic? Was this something they had heard at home —“someone should shoot the son-of-a-bitch”? Just the year before, we had cheered the President for standing up to the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. The crisis was the threatening prospect of Soviet nuclear missiles ninety miles from the US shoreline. Kennedy had backed down the Russian premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Who knows what really happened? Now, we welcomed his brain being splintered by a rifle bullet next to his wife. A lone gunman did it. The Kennedys were for “civil rights.” This is the reason we cheered. Anyone“for civil rights” should have his head blown off. No one expressly said it, but I knew it. There were only two things for which we cheered so raucously back then: either a victory by the Arkansas Razorbacks (or, in my case, the Ole Miss Rebels) in a football game, or the defeat — in this case the murder — of a suspected civil rights leader. No international intrigue like missiles in a communist Cuba would have done it. Civil Rights. That was the reason. Later, we would say the same when John Kennedy’s brother, Robert, was killed. The Kennedys were for civil rights. That’s what got them killed.