Abstract
Readers from the United States or Britain may not be aware that the events which they refer to — axiomatically — as the Cuban Missile Crisis were known in the Soviet Union as the Caribbean Crisis, and in Cuba itself as the October Crisis. These variations in name are not without significance. For the United States, the fact that the Soviet missiles were placed in Cuba had a particular import above and beyond the island’s geographical proximity to the US mainland. This factor can only be understood in the context of an analysis that goes far further back into the lengthy history of US involvement in Cuban affairs than the Bay of Pigs fiasco of April 1961, which is when many accounts tend to stop. In some standard works on the missile crisis, it is still insufficiently acknowledged that the histories of Cuba and the United States have been closely intertwined at least since the late nineteenth century, when the United States famously launched what became known as the Spanish-American War to end a stalemate in Cuba’s second war of independence (1895–8) and oust the Spanish from the Americas. Arguably, the story of US intervention in Cuba begins a full century before that, when US merchants started to exploit Spain’s increasing inability to preserve a trading monopoly in its colonies.
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Notes
Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and its Relations with the United States, 2 vols., (New York: International Publishers, 1962–3) is still one of the best available accounts of nineteenth-century US-Cuban relations.
See Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, new edition (1969; New York and London: Norton, 1999);
Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper; 1965);
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971).
Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, intro. and commentary by Edward Crankshaw, trans. and ed. by Strobe Talbot (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970), 491–5.
Barton J. Bernstein, ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis: Trading the Jupiters in Turkey?’, Political Science Quarterly, 95 (Spring 1980), 97–125.
See Memorandum for McGeorge Bundy on the deployment of ‘Turkish IRBMs’, 22 June 1961, in Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh (eds), The Cuban Missile Crisis: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (New York: The New Press, 1992), 15.
James G. Blight and David A. Welch (eds), On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Noonday, 1990);
Bruce J. Allyn, James G. Blight and David A. Welch (eds), Back to the Brink: Proceedings of the Moscow Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, January 27–28 1989 (Cambridge: Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard, 1992);
James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn and David A. Welch (eds), Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis and the Soviet Collapse (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).
For analyses of US, Soviet and Cuban intelligence during the crisis, see James G. Blight and David A. Welch, Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1998).
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 276.
Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957–63 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Blight and Welch (eds), On the Brink, 83–4; Dean Rusk, As I Saw It: A Secretary of State’s Memoirs (London: Tauris, 1990), 240ff.
Rusk, 242. For the argument that the missile crisis was a direct outcome of the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, see Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982).
On the general argument that Kennedy’s earlier policies created the crisis, see Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba: The Bay of Pigs, Missile Crisis, and Covert War against Fidel Castro’, in Paterson (ed), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);
Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991);
Mark J. White, The Cuban Missile Crisis (London: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1996).
Translated excerpts from Khrushchev’s report to the Supreme Soviet on the origins and outcome of the crisis, 12 December 1962, can be found in Stephen Clissold (ed), Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1918–1968: A Documentary Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 281–2.
Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow (eds), The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 1997).
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958–64 (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997).
Philip Brenner, ‘Cuba and the Missile Crisis’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 22, 1 (February 1990), 142. See also his ‘Thirteen Months: Cuba’s Perspective on the Missile Crisis’, in Nathan (ed), 187–217.
Carlos Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Khrushchev, Kennedy and the Missile Crisis, trans. Mary Todd, ed. Mirta Muñiz (Melbourne: Ocean Press [distributed in the United States by the Talman Co.], 1995), 32.
Jorge Edwards, Persona non grata (Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1973), 178; or, in translation, Persona non grata: An Envoy in Castro’s Cuba, trans. Colin Harding (London: The Bodley Head, 1976), 98.
William Attwood, The Reds and the Blacks: A Personal Adventure (London: Hutchinson, 1967), 142–4.
See Nicola Miller, Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 113–15.
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Miller, N. (2002). The Real Gap in the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Post-Cold War Historiography and the Continued Omission of Cuba. In: Carter, D., Clifton, R. (eds) War and Cold War in American Foreign Policy 1942–62. Cold War History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913852_9
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