One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

Eleven hundred miles away, in Havana, a convoy of government vehicles had just pulled up outside a television studio in the exclusive Vedado section of town. Fidel Castro jumped out of a jeep in his trademark olive green fatigues, followed by ministers in military uniform. A red-and-black diamond on his shoulder epaulettes identified him as a comandante, a major, the highest rank in the Cuban army. Like JFK the previous night, Castro planned to use television to deliver one of the most important speeches of his life and prepare his people for the difficult days ahead.

Television was as important to Castro as it was to Kennedy. It was a very personal medium, enabling Cubans to know him as 'Fidel' rather than 'Castro.' He was not just the commander in chief; he was the professor in chief, constantly teaching, cajoling, explaining. The number of televisions per capita was low in Cuba compared to the United States, but high compared to Latin America. If one person in a neighborhood had a television set, everybody would crowd around to watch Fidel.

The mass media had always been critical to Castro's success as a revolutionary leader. As a young man, he had listened entranced to the weekly speeches of a fiery radical named Eddy Chibas who used the radio to denounce corruption and injustice. During the war against Batista, he set up a small transmitter in the mountains known as 'Radio Rebelde' to drum up support for the revolution. He used an interview with Herbert Matthews of The New York Times to disprove government claims that he was dead. Virtually every step of Fidel's victorious five-day march across Cuba after Batista's hurried departure was shown on live television, culminating in his triumphant entry into Havana on January 8, 1959.

Like Kennedy, Castro was not a born public speaker. Both men had to overcome some initial shyness in order to find their voice. When he first ran for Congress in 1946, Kennedy would practice his speeches many times over in private until he gradually became more relaxed. Castro felt so uncomfortable in public that he had to consciously wind himself up into a lather of indignation. Some observers felt that his legendary loquacity ? he often spoke for five or six hours at a stretch ? was connected to his shyness. 'Fatigued by talking, he rests by talking,' the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez would later observe of Fidel. 'When he starts speaking, his voice is always hard to hear and his course is uncertain, but he takes advantage of anything to gain ground, little by little, until he takes possession of his audience.' Having made the huge mental effort to begin speaking, Castro found it difficult to stop.

After a brief introduction from a sycophantic 'interviewer,' he launched into a tirade against Kennedy and the United States. The speech was the usual hodgepodge of indignation, soaring oratory, long rambling asides, biting sarcasm, and the occasional non sequitur. He used his Jesuit training to dissect Kennedy's speech point by point, barely pausing for breath as he jumped directly from his 'second point' to his 'fourth point' with no mention of the 'third point.'

Kennedy's expressions of sympathy with 'the captive people of Cuba' were grist to Castro's rhetorical mill. 'He is talking about a people that has hundreds of thousands of men under arms. He should have said the armed captive people of Cuba.'

'This is the statement not of a statesman, but of a pirate,' he fumed. 'We are not sovereign by grace of the Yanquis, but in our own right…. They can only take away our sovereignty by wiping us off the face of the earth.'

Much of the force of Castro's delivery came from his mesmerizing body language, which was made for television. The voice alone was somewhat reedy and high-pitched. But he spoke with such conviction that it was easy to be carried along on the torrent of words and gestures. The fierce look in his eyes and the thick black beard wagging back and forth were reminiscent of an Old Testament prophet. The Roman profile assumed a dozen different expressions in rapid succession: scorn, anger, humor, determination, but never the slightest trace of self- doubt. His long, bony hands sliced the air for emphasis, occasionally gripping the sides of his chair. When he made a point, he raised his right forefinger magisterially, as if challenging anyone to disagree with him.

Speaking in front of a Cuban flag, Castro barely mentioned the Russians during his ninety-minute diatribe. Nor did he mention the missiles, except in rejecting Kennedy's various accusations against Cuba. Instead, he delivered an impassioned defense of Cuban national sovereignty, along with a warning that aggressors would inevitably be 'exterminated.'

'Our country will never be inspected by anyone, because we will never give authorization for that to anyone, and we will never abdicate our sovereign prerogatives. Within our frontiers, we are the ones who rule, and we are the ones who do the inspecting.'

Castro's solo performance struck some foreign diplomats in Havana as restrained by his normal standards. But it was still riveting. As he launched into his peroration, he clutched the sides of his chair, as if struggling to stay in his seat. 'All of us, men and women, young and old, we are all united in this hour of danger. All of us, revolutionaries and patriots, will share the same fate. Victory will belong to us all.'

With a final 'Patria o muerte, venceremos,' he jumped out of his chair and rushed from the room. There was no further time to lose.

The streets of Havana had been deserted while Fidel spoke. When he finished, people poured into the rainswept streets, carrying candles and other improvised torches. The night sky was filled with thousands of specks of light as the crowds surged through the alleyways of old Havana singing the national anthem, celebrating an 1868 victory over the Spanish:

No temais una muerte gloriosa,Que morir por la patria es vivir.

Do not fear a glorious death,For to die for the Fatherland is to live.

Maurice Halperin, a former American diplomat who found refuge in Havana after being accused of spying for the Soviet Union, noticed that many of the men in the crowd had armed themselves with meat cleavers and machetes, which they carried proudly in their belts. 'They were geared up for hand-to-hand combat without the slightest suspicion that they could be blown to bits by an invisible enemy.'

The way Castro saw it, his ascent to power in Cuba was like a morality play. He was the hero, pitting himself against a series of much more powerful enemies, first domestic, then external. Whether his opponent was Batista or Kennedy, Castro's method was the same: uncompromising stubbornness. Since he was much weaker than his enemy, he could afford to display no weakness at all.

To get people to follow him, Castro had to project a sense of total conviction. He talked about the future with such certainty, another Third World leader once remarked, he might have been talking about the past. Everything depended on the will of the leader. It was a philosophy adopted from Jose Marti, the 'apostle of Cuban independence,' who died fighting the Spaniards in 1895. After Castro came to power, he turned one of Marti's sayings into a slogan for the revolutionary regime, and had it pasted on billboards the length and breath of Cuba: 'No hay cosas imposibles, sino hombres incapaces ? There are no impossible deeds, just incapable men.'

Like his role model Marti, Castro was willing to die for the cause in which he believed, and expected his followers to do the same. Patria o muerte expressed his personal philosophy. A revolution, almost by definition, was a high-stakes gamble in which there were only two possible outcomes. As his comrade-in-arms Che Guevara put it, 'in a revolution, you win or you die.' That did not mean taking unnecessary risks, but it did mean a willingness to gamble everything on a brilliant throw of the dice. If Fidel died, he would go down in Cuban history as a martyr, like Marti before him. If he lived, he would be a national hero.

It was this sense of going for broke that distinguished Castro from the other two main actors in the crisis. In their different ways, both Kennedy and Khrushchev recognized the realities of the nuclear age, and understood that a nuclear war would inflict unacceptable destruction on victors and vanquished alike. Castro, by contrast, had never been swayed by conventional political calculations. He was the antipolitician with an out-sized ego. For the British ambassador to Havana, Herbert Marchant, the Cuban leader was 'the prima donna of prima donnas,' 'a megalomaniac with paranoiac tendencies,' 'an astonishing character,' and 'a passionate, mixed-up genius.' Alone among the three leaders, Fidel had the messianic ambition of a man selected by history for a unique mission.

He was born on a sugar plantation in Oriente Province in 1926, the third child of a fairly prosperous Spanish immigrant. He was a rebel by the age of seven, throwing tantrums and insisting he be sent to boarding school. After being schooled by the Jesuits in Santiago de Cuba, he attended Havana University, the most prestigious academic institution in the country. He spent much of his time there organizing protests, including a forty-eight-hour general strike in 1947 following the killing of a high school student in an antigovernment demonstration.

The turning point in Fidel's young life was the attempted capture, on July 26, 1953, of the Moncada military barracks in Santiago by himself and 123 armed followers. The attack was a fiasco, resulting in the arrest of most of