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

Strategic Rocket Forces, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin. But the disaster was hushed up and the problems ironed out. The Soviet Union began to mass-produce the R-16 two years later. A total of thirty-six had been deployed by the time of the missile crisis and were on fifteen-minute alert. All but ten of these missiles were based in silos.

The 'missile gap' against which Kennedy had campaigned during the 1960 presidential election did indeed exist. But it was in America's favor, not Russia's ? and it was even wider than American experts believed.

3:00 A.M. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 (2:00 A.M. HAVANA)

In Havana, it was still the middle of the night. Soviet generals and Cuban comandantes were at their command posts waiting for news of a U.S. airborne landing, which was expected from hour to hour. At Soviet military headquarters in El Chico, officers sat around talking, smoking cigarettes, and exchanging the occasional mordant joke. A report arrived after midnight that U.S. naval ships had been sighted east of Havana. Machine guns were distributed, but it was a false alarm. In the heavy autumn mist, a lookout mistook some Cuban fishing boats for an American invading force.

Fidel Castro was also wide awake, as was usual for him at this hour in the morning. As the minutes ticked by, he became ever more pessimistic about the chances of avoiding an American invasion. The historical analogy that troubled him most was Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Stalin had received numerous intelligence reports about a Nazi invasion, but he ignored them all. Fearing a provocation to trap him into an unwanted war, he refused to mobilize the Soviet armed forces until it was too late. Such shortsightedness had 'cost the Soviets millions of men, almost all their air force, their mechanized units, enormous retreats.' The Nazis reached the gates of Moscow and Leningrad. The homeland of world socialism was almost wiped out. Analyzing the state of the world that Saturday morning, Castro worried that 'history would repeat itself.' He was determined to ensure that Khrushchev did not make the same mistake as Stalin. He would send a personal message to Khrushchev to alert him to the danger and encourage him to stand firm. At 2:00 a.m., he had President Dorticos telephone Ambassador Alekseev to tell him he was coming over for 'an important meeting.'

The Soviet Embassy was located in the Vedado section of Havana, a leafy enclave of turn-of-the century mansions, Art Nouveau villas, and Art Deco apartment buildings expropriated from the Cuban elite. The neoclassical two-story mansion on the corner of B and 13th streets that now housed the embassy had previously belonged to a family of sugar barons who left Cuba shortly after the revolution. In addition to their offices, the ambassador and several of his top assistants also had apartments in the complex. Vedado was particularly magical at night when the dim streetlights cast long shadows through vine-covered porticoes and the scent of almond trees hung in the air.

The Cuban leader's jeep pulled into the sweeping driveway of the embassy, behind wrought-iron gates covered in wisteria. Castro asked the ambassador to take him to the bomb shelter beneath the embassy, saying he feared an imminent American air strike, even an invasion. He paced up and down, waving his long, bony hands in the air. A yanqui attack was 'inevitable,' he insisted. 'The chances of it not happening are five in one hundred.' He was calculating the odds, just like JFK.

He was full of complaints about General Pliyev and his staff. He told Alekseev that Soviet commanders lacked basic information about the American military buildup. They had only found out the details of the naval blockade a day after it came into force. They were accustomed to the classic rules of war, such as they had known in World War II, and did not understand that this was going to be a very different kind of conflict. The short distance between Cuba and America meant that U.S. planes would be able to destroy the Soviet missile sites with very little warning, even without using nuclear weapons. There was little Soviet and Cuban air defenses could do to prevent a devastating strike.

The way Castro saw it, a conventional war was likely to escalate very quickly into a nuclear exchange. As he later recalled, he 'took it for granted that it would become a nuclear war anyway, and that we were going to disappear.' Rather than submit to an American occupation, he and his comrades 'were ready to die in the defense of our country.' He had no problem authorizing the use of tactical nuclear weapons against American invaders, even if it meant poisoning Cuba for generations to come. He and other Cuban leaders understood very well that 'we would have been annihilated' in the event of nuclear war. They would perish 'con suprema dignidad.'

As usual with Fidel, it all came back to dignidad. But there was also an element of political calculation in his preoccupation with death and sacrifice. His entire geopolitical strategy was based on raising the cost of an invasion of Cuba to the point of unacceptability to the United States. Accepting the unacceptable and thinking the unthinkable were key to his survival strategy. Nuclear war was the ultimate game of chicken. If Castro could convince Kennedy and Khrushchev that he was willing to die for his beliefs, that gave him a certain advantage. Since he was the weakest of the three leaders, stubbornness, defiance, and dignidad were his only real weapons.

It was impossible to tell with Castro where dignidad ended and political calculation took over. His overriding goal was ensuring the survival of his regime. This was the reason why he had accepted Soviet missiles in the first place. He had long since concluded that the United States was implacably opposed to his vision for Cuba. The Bay of Pigs was merely the forerunner of more serious attempts to get rid of him. His best hope of deterring an invasion was to place Cuba under the Soviet nuclear umbrella. Once nuclear missiles were installed and operating in Cuba, the yanquis would never dare invade.

On the other hand, Castro did not want to appear too indebted to the Soviet Union or leave the impression that Cuba was incapable of defending itself. So he wrapped his decision to accept Khrushchev's offer of nuclear missiles in a high-sounding justification. He informed Soviet envoys that he would accept Khrushchev's offer not because he was desperate for the protection provided by the missiles but to 'strengthen the Socialist camp.' In other words, he was doing Moscow a favor rather than the other way round.

Alekseev knew Castro better than any other Soviet official or foreign diplomat. Nicknamed 'Don Alejandro' by the Cubans, he enjoyed extraordinary access to Fidel, first as a KGB agent and later as Soviet ambassador. But the Cuban leader remained for him an enigma.

On a personal level, Alekseev was under Fidel's spell. He regarded Castro as the reincarnation of his childhood political heroes who had ensured the triumph of the Russian Revolution. He admired his single- mindedness and enjoyed his easygoing informality. But he also knew from personal experience that the Cuban leader was quick to take offense. He would seize on a tiny detail and make a huge issue out of it. The idea of Communist Party discipline, which was everything for an apparatchik like Alekseev, mattered little to an autocrat like Castro. In dispatches to Moscow, the ambassador attributed Castro's 'very complex and excessively sensitive' personality to 'insufficient ideological preparedness.' The Cuban leader was like a willful child, easily swayed by his emotions. Alekseev was unaccustomed to revolutionaries who hung crucifixes on their walls and invoked the power of the Virgin Mary.

Like his political masters in Moscow, Alekseev was willing to overlook Castro's ideological idiosyncrasies. Just as Fidel needed the Soviets, the Soviets needed Fidel. They had not protested in the slightest earlier that year when Castro purged a group of orthodox pro-Moscow Communists led by Anibal Escalante. Ideological purity was less important than the reality of political power. The way Alekseev saw it, Castro was 'the main political force' in Cuba and the personification of the revolution. Without Castro, there probably would have been no revolution. 'Therefore, we should fight for him, educate him, and sometimes forgive him his mistakes.'

Alekseev, whose Spanish was good but not perfect, struggled to keep up with the torrent of thoughts pouring out of Castro in the predawn hours of Saturday morning. One of his assistants jotted down a few phrases in Spanish and handed the paper to another aide for translation into Russian. But they had to begin all over again after Castro expressed unhappiness with the draft.

Fidel was having difficulty articulating exactly what he wanted Khrushchev to do. At times, it sounded as if he wanted his Soviet allies to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States. At other times, he seemed to suggest that they should use nuclear weapons in self-defense if Cuba was attacked. As one draft followed another into the burn bin, Alekseev went to the code room and dictated a holding telegram:

TOP SECRET.TOP PRIORITY.

F. CASTRO IS WITH US AT THE EMBASSY AND IS PREPARING A PERSONAL LETTER FOR N.S. KHRUSHCHEV THAT WILL BE SENT TO HIM IMMEDIATELY.

IN F. CASTRO'S OPINION, THE INTERVENTION IS ALMOST INEVITABLE AND WILL OCCUR IN APPROXIMATELY 24–72 HOURS.