The history of the Cuban Missile Crisis has been told so many times that it is tempting to assume there is not much left to say. Renata Keller proves the falsity of this premise in this engrossing new monograph that casts those fateful 13 days in October 1962 into regional focus.
Access to Soviet archives and Cuban perspectives has long nuanced traditional accounts of President Kennedy heroically squaring off against Khrushchev. Below the bilateral brinksmanship, we now know about other perilous flashpoints: the broken chain of command that led to the downing of a U.S. U2 spy plane, the near arming of a nuclear armed torpedo by a Soviet submarine captain who assumed war had broken out, Fidel Castro’s letter to Khrushchev that the latter interpreted as calling for a Soviet first strike. But the crisis has never been told as a hemispheric story. To do so, Keller argues, sheds fuller light on its origins, resolution, and consequences.
One cannot understand the reasons Castro accepted Moscow’s offer to install nuclear missiles in Cuban territory absent the regional isolation to which revolutionary Cuba had been subjected in the early 1960s. No doubt, the immediate threat of a second U.S. invasion following the Bay of Pigs was top of mind for Cuban leaders. But U.S. anti-Castro efforts were intimately related to Washington’s push for most of Latin America’s governments to break diplomatic relations with the island and expel it from the Organization of American States (OAS). The Bay of Pigs counted on the logistical collaboration of right-wing, anti-communist authoritarian governments in Nicaragua and Guatemala. Centrist democratic leaders, such as Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela, had also turned strongly against Castro. Paradoxically, faced with threats to the island’s sovereignty from neighbors (while also supporting nascent insurgencies within those neighbors’ borders), Cuba’s leaders were amenable to giving up part of their sovereignty to allow a foreign nation to install and control missile installations on island territory.
The region was also instrumental in bringing the crisis to an end. Keller recovers failed, but significant, back-channel efforts by, among others, the Brazilian government of João Goulart to mediate with Havana. She also reminds us that the naval quarantine that the Kennedy administration pursued as an intermediate step before air strikes was a hemispheric operation under the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance. It took some cajoling, but even governments such as Brazil and Mexico, which resisted breaking off diplomatic ties with Cuba due to traditional defenses of non-intervention, joined a unanimous vote at the OAS. Not all nations collaborated by sending naval assets, and some governments made clear they were not endorsing further military action. But regional leaders, right and center-left, interpreted the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba as such a threat that they were able to put aside their differences, giving greater legitimacy to the U.S. response.
Finally, by combing government and press archives throughout the hemisphere, Keller shows that the ripple effects of the crisis extended from the Caribbean and Central America to the Andes and the Southern Cone. While Cubans and Americans were at the edge of their seats, Latin American societies were thrown into protest, as contending forces in the region’s polarized Cold War landscape mobilized to either defend socialist Cuba’s right to protect itself with Soviet assistance or call on their governments to join hemispheric efforts to eliminate the island’s communist threat. Some demonstrations were violently suppressed. At the same time, regional policymakers and citizens worried that in the event of an all-out conflagration, strategic sites within their borders—such as the Panama Canal—could be targets. Longer-term impacts are also revealing. The distant Argentinine military’s collaboration with the naval quarantine set precedents for military-to-military cooperation with Washington that extended, with tragic costs, into the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s. More positively, the scars of the crisis helped motivate Latin American governments to sign the Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1967, designating Latin America and the Caribbean a nuclear-weapons-free zone. Cuba eventually signed the agreement in 1995.
Keller may slightly oversell the long-term consequences for Soviet–Cuban relations. Castro was of course furious about the USSR’s decision to withdraw the missiles over the Cuban government’s head, considering it a betrayal. Cuban foreign policy thereafter preserved an independent, at times defiant, streak. But the assertion that the Cubans “never again entrusted their fate so completely to another country” (231) is debatable given the high degree of economic dependence that Cuba eventually developed on the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, especially after 1970.
Nonetheless, Keller ingeniously frames the legacy of the crisis—whether at the level of government or society—as a “dangerous reckoning” over the meaning of three contested concepts: security, sovereignty, and solidarity (236). Were Soviet missile deployments the ultimate demonstration of solidarity in defense of Cuba’s sovereignty and security? Or did the missiles compromise the region’s security through the ceding of Cuban sovereignty, generating regional solidarity in response? Thankfully, cooler heads helped render these questions useful thought exercises rather than a prelude to catastrophe.
