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

the outgunned and outnumbered rebels. But Castro was able to turn the defeat into the founding myth of his July 26 political movement and make himself the main focus of opposition to Batista. He used his trial as a platform to attack the government and gather more followers, uttering his most celebrated line, 'Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.' ('La historia me absolvera.') He received a pardon after serving less than two years of his fifteen-year sentence, and left for Mexico in July 1955.

'We shall be free or martyrs,' Castro told his eighty-one followers as they set sail from Mexico on board the yacht Granma in November 1956, bound for the Sierra Maestra, the ridge of high mountains along the southern coast of Oriente. As usual, he was absurdly optimistic about his chances of achieving the seemingly impossible, the overthrow of Batista. He looked ahead one step at a time. 'If we leave, we shall arrive. If we arrive, we shall enter. If we enter, we shall win.'

'We have won the war,' he proclaimed exuberantly a few weeks later, after his army survived the first of many ambushes by the pro-Batista forces, leaving him with just seven followers and seven weapons.

Castro's life showed that individuals could change the course of history, whatever Marxists might say about the preeminence of the class struggle. In his version of history, which had more to do with Cuban nationalism than Soviet-style communism, the martyr-hero was always center stage.

Fidel had been preparing for a climactic confrontation with the United States for years. Even when he was in the mountains, fighting Batista's armies, he had assumed that one day he would be called upon to launch 'a much bigger and greater war' ? against the Americans. 'I realize that this will be my true destiny,' he wrote his aide and lover, Celia Sanchez, on June 5, 1958, after hearing that his rebel army had been attacked by the U.S.-supplied bombs of the Batista air force.

Castro's conviction that the decisive war would be against America reflected his belief that Washington would never permit Cuba to be truly independent because it had too many political and economic interests on the island. From the perspective of many Cubans, Fidel included, the history of U.S.-Cuban relations was the story of imperialism dressed up as idealism. The United States had kicked out the Spanish colonialists only to end up as a new occupying power. Although the Marines eventually withdrew, America continued to maintain a tight economic grip over Cuba through corporations like the United Fruit Company.

Americans, of course, tended to take a much more benign view of their involvement with Cuba. Men like Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood, the last American governor-general of Cuba, saw themselves as altruists, assisting the infant republic along the path to political stability and economic modernity. Wood spent his time building roads, installing sewers, combating corruption, devising a democratic electoral system. It was a thankless slog. 'We are going ahead as fast as we can, but we are dealing with a race that has been steadily going downhill for a hundred years,' he complained in one dispatch.

Castro saw little difference between Kennedy and the imperialist Teddy Roosevelt. JFK was nothing but 'an illiterate and ignorant millionaire.' After the Bay of Pigs, it was simply a matter of time before the Americans tried again, with much greater force.

Anti-Americanism was Castro's strongest political card in the fall of 1962. A year that he had proclaimed el ano de la planificacion ? the year of economic planning ? had turned into a year of economic disaster. The economy was in a state of free fall, partly due to an American trade embargo and the flight of the middle class, but mainly because of misguided economic policies. The attempt to emulate the Soviet economic model of central planning and forced industrialization had resulted in chronic shortages.

The sugar harvest, which accounted for more than four-fifths of Cuba's total export earnings, was down 30 percent on the previous year, to less than 5 million tons. Food riots had broken out in western Cuba in June. Farmers let their crops rot in the fields rather than hand them over to the state. With practically nothing to buy in state-run stores, the black market thrived. In the meantime, money was poured away on prestige projects designed to showcase Cuba's economic independence. One of the best known examples was a pencil factory, built with Soviet assistance. It turned out that it was cheaper to import pencils ready-made than import raw materials such as wood and graphite.

Castro's problems were political as well as economic. His troops were still fighting a guerrilla war with rebels in the Escambray Mountains of central Cuba. Earlier in the year, he had beaten off a challenge from orthodox Communists, forcing their leader, Anibal Escalante, to flee the country and take refuge in Prague. Castro's denunciation of 'sectarianism' was followed by a thorough purge of the Communist Party, with two thousand out of six thousand party members being weeded out.

Photo Insert One

^{Meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm). White House, Cabinet Room, October 29, 1962. Clockwise starting from the flag: Robert McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, General Maxwell Taylor, Paul Nitze, Donald Wilson, Theodore Sorensen, McGeorge Bundy (hidden), Douglas Dillon, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson (hidden), Robert F. Kennedy, Llewellyn Thompson, William C. Foster, John McCone (hidden), George Ball, Dean Rusk, President Kennedy. [Cecil Stoughton, Kennedy Presidential Library]}

^{President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy outside the West Wing of the White House in October 1962. [Cecil Stoughton, Kennedy Presidential Library]}

^{Nikita Khrushchev and President Kennedy during their only meeting, in Vienna in June 1961. [USIA-NARA]}

^{Nikita Khrushchev embraces Fidel Castro in Harlem, New York City, in September 1960. [USIA- NARA]}

^{Fidel Castro at El Chico during the missile crisis, with Soviet commander General Issa Pliyev (right). [MAVI]}

^{Castro and Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet leader who knew him best, in November 1962. Soviet ambassador Aleksandr Alekseev is in the background. [USIA-NARA]}

^{Prior to a Cuba mission, ground crews service a U.S. Navy RF-8 Crusader at Key West, Florida. The main forward-shooting photo bay is visible at the bottom of the plane. [USNHC]}

^{Navy Commander William Ecker (left), who led the first low-level overflight of Cuba on October 23, shakes hands with Marine Captain John Hudson. Drawings on the plane fuselage show Fidel Castro with chickens to commemorate each successful Cuba mission. [USNHC]}

^{Photograph of a nuclear warhead bunker under construction at San Cristobal Medium-Range Ballistic Missile Site No. 1, shot by Ecker with a nose camera at the same time as the oblique photograph below. [NARA]}

^{Photograph of San Cristobal MRBM Site No. 1 taken by Ecker on Tuesday, October 23, on Blue Moon Mission 8003, showing missile equipment, fueling vehicles, and nuclear warhead vans. The photograph was shot with a left-side oblique camera at the same time as the photograph above. [NARA]}

^{Previously unpublished photograph of a USAF RF-101 'Voodoo' jet entering Cuban air space on November 1 to inspect the dismantling of missile sites. [NARA]}

^{Previously unpublished photograph of a U.S. Navy RF-8 Crusader flying over central Cuba on Thursday, October 25, on Blue Moon Mission 5010. [NARA]}

^{Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations during the Security Council debate on October 25, using photos of Soviet missile sites. [UN]}