Cuban missile crisis (Third of four parts)
How the U.S. played Russian roulette with nuclear war
By Noam Chomsky
From guardian.co.uk
The problem with Castro
In the case of Cuba, the State Department policy planning council explained:
“The primary danger we face in Castro is … in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries … The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half.”
The Monroe Doctrine announced the US intention, then unrealizable, of dominating the western hemisphere. An example of great contemporary import is revealed in Iran scholar Ervand Abrahamian’s important recent study of the US-UK coup that overthrew the parliamentary regime of Iran in 1953. With scrupulous examination of internal records, he shows convincingly that standard accounts cannot be sustained. The primary causes were not cold war concerns, nor Iranian irrationality that undermined Washington’s “benign intentions”, nor even access to oil or profits, but rather the demand for “overall controls” with the broader implications for global dominance, threatened by independent nationalism. That is what we discover over and over by investigating particular cases.
Cuba, too, not surprisingly – though the fanaticism might merit examination in this case. US policy towards Cuba is harshly condemned throughout Latin America, and indeed most of the world, but “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” is understood to be meaningless rhetoric intoned mindlessly on 4 July. Ever since polls have been taken on the matter, a considerable majority of the US population has favored normalization of relations with Cuba, but that, too, is insignificant. Dismissal of public opinion is, of course, quite normal. What is interesting in this case is dismissal of powerful sectors of US economic power, which also favor normalization, and are usually highly influential in setting policy: energy, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals and others. That suggests that there is a powerful state interest involved in punishing Cubans, as well as the cultural factors revealed in the hysteria of the Camelot intellectuals.
The end … only officially
The missile crisis officially ended on 28 October. The outcome was not obscure. That evening, in a special CBS News broadcast, Charles Collingwood reported that the world had come out “from under the most terrible threat of nuclear holocaust since the second world war”, with a “humiliating defeat for Soviet policy”. Dobbs comments that the Russians tried to pretend that the outcome was “yet another triumph for Moscow’s peace-loving foreign policy over warmongering imperialists”, as “the supremely wise, always reasonable Soviet leadership had saved the world from the threat of nuclear destruction.” Extricating the basic facts from the fashionable ridicule, Khrushchev’s agreement to capitulate “had saved the world from the threat of nuclear destruction”.
The crisis, however, was not over. On 8 November, the Pentagon announced that all known Soviet missile bases had been dismantled. And on the same day, Stern reports, “a sabotage team carried out an attack on a Cuban factory,” though Kennedy’s terror campaign, Operation Mongoose, had been formally curtailed at the peak of the crisis. The 8 November terror attack lends support to Bundy’s observation that the threat to peace was Cuba, not Turkey – where the Russians were not continuing a lethal assault. Not, however, what Bundy had in mind, or could have understood.
More details are added by the highly respected scholar Raymond Garthoff, who also had a great deal of experience within the government, in his careful 1987 account of the missile crisis. On 8 November, he writes, “a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility,” killing 400 workers, according to a Cuban government letter to the UN Secretary General. Garthoff comments that “the Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba,” particularly since the terrorist attack was launched from the US. These and other “third-party actions” reveal again, he concludes, “that the risk and danger to both sides could have been extreme, and catastrophe not excluded.” Garthoff also reviews the murderous and destructive operations of Kennedy’s terrorist campaign, which we would certainly regard as more than ample justification for war, if the US or its allies or clients were victims, not perpetrators.
From the same source we learn further that on 23 August 1962, the president had issued National Security Memorandum No 181, “a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be followed by US military intervention”, involving “significant US military plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and equipment” that were surely known to Cuba and Russia. Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified, including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel “where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans”; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; contaminating sugar shipments; and other atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida. Shortly after came “the most dangerous moment in human history”, not exactly out of the blue.
Playing with fire
Kennedy officially renewed the terrorist operations after the crisis ebbed. Ten days before his assassination, he approved a CIA plan for “destruction operations” by US proxy forces “against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships”. A plot to assassinate Castro was apparently initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The terrorist campaign was called off in 1965, but “one of Nixon’s first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba,” Garthoff reports.
In the current issue of Political Science Quarterly, Montague Kern observes that the Cuban missile crisis is one of those “full-bore crises … in which an ideological enemy (the Soviet Union) is universally perceived to have gone on the attack, leading to a rally-’round-the-flag effect that greatly expands support for a president, increasing his policy options.” Kern is right that it is “universally perceived” that way, apart from those who have escaped sufficiently from the ideological shackles to pay some attention to the facts. Kern is, in fact, one of them. Another is Sheldon Stern, who recognizes what has long been known to such deviants. As he writes, we now know that:
“Khrushchev’s original explanation for shipping missiles to Cuba had been fundamentally true: the Soviet leader had never intended these weapons as a threat to the security of the United States, but rather considered their deployment a defensive move to protect his Cuban allies from American attacks and as a desperate effort to give the USSR the appearance of equality in the nuclear balance of power.”
Dobbs, too, recognizes that:
“Castro and his Soviet patrons had real reasons to fear American attempts at regime change, including, as a last resort, a US invasion of Cuba … [Khrushchev] was also sincere in his desire to defend the Cuban revolution from the mighty neighbor to the north.”
