BY MOISÉS SAAB
Below we reprint an interview with Jorge Risquet, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, on the
October 1962 "missile" crisis. At that time, the U.S.
administration of President John Kennedy brought the world to
the brink of nuclear war and threatened the annihilation of the
entire Cuban people over the issue of Soviet missiles that were
installed in Cuba in an act of sovereign self-defense. Kennedy
intended to mount an invasion of Cuba, as he had been planning
to do for more than a year. His hand was stayed when the
Pentagon informed him that, in face of an armed and ready Cuban
population, he could expect an estimated 18,000 U.S. troop
casualties during the first 10 days of an invasion.
The interview, headlined, "The month that we lived most dangerously," appeared originally in issue no. 308 in 1997 of the magazine Cuba Internacional, published in Havana. The translation from Spanish is by the Militant. Reprinted by permission.
Thirty-five years ago, in October 1962, the world was on the brink of nuclear holocaust because of the so-called Missile Crisis.
So close, in fact, that former U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara does not even want to think about the subject because, to this day, it makes him shudder.
Jorge Risquet is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and a specialist on the causes and effects of that wild spiraling of tensions between Cuba and the two great superpowers of the time, the Soviet Union and the United States, over the placement on the island of intermediate- range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Three and a half decades later, he remembers that episode and its consequences, which could have ended in an unprecedented tragedy for humanity.
How was defense organized for the very likely possibility of direct U.S. military intervention in Cuba?
In the capital, Fidel [Castro], working directly with the General Staff, was responsible for the provinces of Havana and Matanzas; Che [Guevara] was in Pinar del Río with a command post in Cueva de los Portales; in Las Villas and Camaguey, that is, the center of the country, the command was entrusted to Commander of the Revolution Juan Almeida; while Raúl [Castro] was on the eastern front.
Looking back 35 years later, would you say that this was the month that we lived most dangerously?
Well, we were within a hair's breadth of nuclear war.
What or who avoided this confrontation?
One would have to be crazy to want nuclear war, because although the response capability of the Soviet Union was inferior to that of the United States - we didn't know it at the time, but we later found out that the United States held a 17-to-1 edge over the USSR - and Nikita Khrushchev [the former first secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR] bluffed a lot with the missiles. The millions of human lives, the devastation, and the radioactive consequences for everyone involved would have been unimaginable, irrecoverable.
Did the October, or Missile, Crisis simply break out or had it been prepared?
First we must look at the reasons why nuclear weapons were installed in Cuba, and then at the development of events. In the first place, we were convinced - and secret documents released later proved us right - that the United States was preparing a direct military attack on Cuba.
Later, when it was declassified, we would learn about the "Mongoose" plan, which in fact was to culminate in October, when, after creating a civil war situation in Cuba - according to the fevered imagination of the CIA officials in charge of the plan - U.S. troops would intervene.
We saw this coming, although we didn't know about the entire plan, which was controlled personally by Robert Kennedy.
So we asked the Soviets to accelerate the schedule for the delivery of armaments.
On May 29, 1962, they sent us a high-level delegation, led by Rachidov, alternate member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of the USSR and first secretary of one of the Asian republics; Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, chief of Soviet missile forces; and Aleksandr Alexeev, who had recently been named Soviet ambassador to Cuba, a tremendous man. He had excellent relations with Cuba; he was here as a journalist during the first days of the revolutionary triumph, and he thought like a Cuban. He thought we were right throughout the crisis.
This commission explained that the Soviet leadership had analyzed our point of view and had come to the same conclusion as we had with respect to the probable direct military attack, and that the only thing that could deter this attack was the installation of a number of nuclear warheads on medium- and intermediate-range missiles.
The Cuban leadership studied the issue and approached it in this way: if it were solely for the defense of Cuba, we would have preferred another solution over this one - for example, a military pact between the USSR and Cuba and a public statement that an attack on Cuba would be considered an attack on the USSR. Such a formulation would also have been a deterrent and, furthermore, would have been backed up by the shipment of more conventional arms and the corresponding advisers. But we told them we accepted the option of the nuclear missiles, considering that this would improve the East-West relationship of forces in favor of the socialist camp, to which we belonged, and subsequently would strengthen our defense against the plans being developed by the Pentagon to invade us.
We had no idea of the nuclear imbalance between the United States and the USSR. Fidel [Castro] would say years later that if he had known that the imbalance at the time was so great, he would have recommended to the Soviet leadership that they be more cautious and reject the idea of installing the missiles here, because we could not be so imprudent when the gap was so great.
The Cuban leadership thought we should not approach the question solely from the point of view of defending Cuba. Since we belonged to the socialist camp and were asking it to make sacrifices for us, then it was also incumbent upon us to assume responsibilities involving risks and danger.
From the standpoint of international law, Cuba is a sovereign country, as was the USSR, and we adopted an agreement covered by Article 51 of the UN Charter.
It was for all these reasons that the Cuban leadership agreed to respond positively to the Soviet proposal. The Soviets sent a draft accord that was a sloppy, tactless document. The agreement was rewritten in Cuba, in Commander-in- Chief Fidel Castro's own handwriting, and was taken to Moscow by Raúl [Castro, Cuban armed forces minister] to be translated and studied. The translation turned out to be very difficult, because the discussions were with then-Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, with no one else present besides Ambassador Alexeev. We didn't speak Russian and they didn't speak Spanish, and our knowledge of diplomatic language was weak, so we often had to resort to dictionaries to get the right terms.
Nikita Khrushchev's autobiography gives an account of the events according to which the Cuban authorities did not agree, for example, on the question of the secret or public character of the military treaty. How did it really happen?
Cuba was not in favor of nondisclosure of the accord, given the missile question. We were convinced that not making the Cuba-USSR military accord public would lend a dubious character to a legal and sovereign act, which the United States would use in its favor. And we let the Soviets know this very frankly. Khrushchev did not want to make it public in the middle of the U.S. congressional election campaign, because he did not want to harm Kennedy's chances of winning. He proposed making the announcement in November, during a visit he was planning to Cuba, after the U.S. elections. This is the historical reality.
Then the question arose: What would the USSR do if, in the middle of the operation, the United States discovered it? How would the two superpowers react? The delegation that came in late May had no answer to this. When Raúl was in Moscow in July, he asked the Soviet prime minister the same question, on Fidel's behalf.
And?
And Nikita's answer was, "We will send the Baltic Fleet."
We were pleased with the promised action, as it meant the
Soviets had decided not to retreat in case the crisis
eventually broke out.
In late August, another Cuban delegation, headed by Che [Guevara], went to the USSR. He asked Khrushchev the same question, this time less hypothetically, as the United States was creating an atmosphere of hysteria over the arrival of a large quantity of armaments in Cuba. Nikita, who was a short man with short limbs, raised his right arm and reiterated, "We will send the Baltic Fleet." Che proposed signing the military accord on behalf of Cuba and making it public immediately. The Soviet leadership did not agree to announce it at that time, but rather in November, after the U.S. elections; also, Nikita and Fidel were to sign it in Havana.
Later, when the crisis broke out over the installation of missiles with nuclear warheads, how do you evaluate the course of events?
My impression is that Nikita arrived at a time when he was flustered by the crisis. And also that the senior Soviet leadership made several errors, including the discussion on the offensive or defensive character of those weapons. The correct thing would have been to proclaim the sovereign right of Cuba to acquire the arms it considered necessary for its defense. All Cuban statements were based on this right and we never fell into the trap of labeling the type of weapons. It was a long and pointless discussion, but for the U.S. government, a weapon capable of reaching its territory was considered "offensive."
Another error was not announcing the accord. If, as soon as the pact was adopted, it was announced that Cuba had the weapons necessary to confront any foreign attack, it would have accomplished its political and military objective.
On the other hand, however, it must be said that, in general, the Soviet operation of transferring weapons as well as personnel, and their deployment, was flawless, considering the magnitude and distance.
As is known, this situation was settled between Moscow and Washington, without taking into account the Cuban position. Did this bilateral resolution damage relations between Cuba and the USSR?
Of course it damaged them. But rather than pour vinegar and salt in the wound, we used balm, and we worked to put that episode behind us, which we did.
Given the fact that the Cubans were excluded from the negotiations to resolve this problem, the outlook for relations between Havana and Washington was tense. Would the situation have been different if Cuba had participated in the discussions?
The discussion of the problem should always have been between the three of us - the USSR, the United States, and Cuba. The crisis was handled the wrong way; Cuba should have been heard. There was no justification for keeping us out of the negotiations.
We believe our participation in the discussions could have extracted guarantees to halt the preparations for an attack, the spy flights, the economic and financial blockade - which had been decreed in early 1962 - the acts of sabotage, and the return of the land holding the U.S. naval base on Cuban territory, which is important to the United States for purely political reasons since, militarily speaking, it is obsolete and constitutes a death trap.
The Soviets, nevertheless, achieved the dismantling of the U.S. missile bases in Turkey.... For the United States, these bases had become a liability more than an advantage. We now know that they had raised withdrawing them with the Turks a year earlier. They feared that in a confrontation with the USSR, Soviet troops would occupy them. But the Turkish government was opposed, since it considered them important for its defense, and the United States did not insist. If you think about it, they were more considerate of their Turkish allies than the Soviets were with us.
What impact did this situation, its development and outcome, have in Cuba?
Since then we have known for certain that, in the event of an attack, we can count only on ourselves. Che described it very well when he called them "the brilliant, but sad days of the October Crisis."
Brilliant, because the people knew that they were risking the very existence of the country and confronted the situation with dedication and courage. There was not a hint of panic either in the country's leadership or among the people. More than 400,000 people mobilized and formed the regular forces, the reserves, and the militia units. The United States, as McNamara confessed to me at the first "Tripartite Meeting on the Crisis" in Moscow, did not know about this enormous deployment capacity of Cuba.
Sad, because Cuba continued to be subjected to the danger of an attack. There are those who say that we succeeded in winning the pledge that a military attack would not be launched, but this is a fallacy. If the United States didn't attack, it was due to their growing involvement in the Vietnam War and the steady strengthening of Cuban military power. Experience showed that they could not fight two wars at the same time.
Does this mean that the situation has radically changed?
During all those years Cuba grew stronger, and we have more
weapons and are better armed. The doctrine of war of all the
people was conceived and put into practice, by which millions
of people have weapons and a means of combat, are organized,
and know what their post is in the event of war.
The great hero, the protagonist of that crisis, is the same as today: the people. They are resisting, not a short-term tense situation, but rather daily challenges of every kind. And, among the people, the heroes are the women, who every day face the problems of feeding the family, caring for the kids - basically everything necessary to survive.
And together with the people, we have a leadership capable of finding solutions to these everyday problems, of resisting the special period and the blockade, which has been intensified to inconceivable lengths by the Helms-Burton law, of defending the country's independence, and leading the gradual recovery of the economy.