The Failure of the Cuban Invasion

Table of Content

THE FAILURE OF THE CUBAN INVASIONI

CUBAN GOVERNMENT1

RISK NUCLEAR WAR1

CASTRO2

CRISIS2

CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS4

CIA REPORT ON SOVIET NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES6

CUBA'S MINISTRY OF PUBLIC HEALTH9

OPERATION MONGOOSE9

SOVIET PRESIDIUM11

ORIENTE PROVINCE12

CONCLUSION15

WORKS CITED16

BIBLIOGRAPHY17

Cuban Government

The Cuban government sends several requests for peace between Cuba and United States, only weeks after the Bay of Pigs invasion. Despite Cuba's outstanding victory of self-defense, Cuba still makes efforts to bring peace between the two nations and to re-establish trade agreements. The United States refuses. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was furious at what he considered Kennedy's flagrant interference in Soviet-Cuban affairs and his violation of freedom of navigation. But by the time the quarantine took effect on the morning of 24 October—after a unanimous endorsement by the Organization of American States—Khrushchev ordered Soviet ships not to challenge the blockade. For several days a settlement proved elusive and pressure built for more decisive action. (Stern 102)

Risk Nuclear War

Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev wanted to risk nuclear war over the issue, and both became increasingly concerned that an accident or inadvertent military action might trigger escalation. An apparent break in the tension came on 26 October, when, in a rambling, emotional letter, Khrushchev offered to withdraw the missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. But in a second, tougher letter received the following morning, (Trahair 85) Khrushchev demanded that Kennedy withdraw analogous Jupiter missiles from Turkey (deployed under the aegis of NATO). Most of Kennedy's advisers argued strongly against this, on the ground that it would be interpreted by the Soviets as evidence of American weakness, and by NATO as betrayal of an ally. Kennedy decided to ignore Khrushchev's latest demand and accept his earlier offer.

As the ExComm deliberated on 27 October, word reached the White House that an American U-2 reconnaissance plane had been shot down over Cuba, and that another had inadvertently strayed over Siberian air space, narrowly avoiding a similar fate. Kennedy resolved to bring the crisis to an end. Ignoring the ExComm's advice, he secretly agreed that the United States would withdraw its missiles from Turkey (Stern 45) “within a few months” as a private quid pro quo to a UN-verified withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Kennedy would also pledge publicly not to invade Cuba. Khrushchev accepted, and on 28 October the acute phase of the crisis came to an end.

Castro

Castro, feeling betrayed by his Soviet patron, refused to allow United Nations inspectors on Cuban soil to verify the withdrawal. But satisfied by aerial photography that the Soviets had withdrawn the weapons the United States considered offensive, Kennedy issued a proclamation terminating the quarantine on 21 November. (Nathan 26) The causes of the crisis have long been debated. Khrushchev conceived the deployment in the late spring of 1962, after a hasty and uncritical decision-making process involving only a small group of advisers. His goals appear to have been to deter a feared American invasion of Cuba; to redress the United States's massive superiority in strategic nuclear weapons, publicly revealed by the United ...