Cuban Confrontations PDF

Cuban Confrontations Although the United States regarded Latin America as its backyard, its southern neighbors feared and resented the powerful Colossus of the North. In 1961 Kennedy extended the hand of friendship with the Alliance for Progress (Alianza para el Progreso), hailed as a Mars...

Cuban Confrontations Although the United States regarded Latin America as its backyard, its southern neighbors feared and resented the powerful Colossus of the North. In 1961 Kennedy extended the hand of friendship with the Alliance for Progress (Alianza para el Progreso), hailed as a Marshall Plan for Latin America and intended to quiet communist agitation. But results were disappointing; there was little alliance and even less progress. American handouts had little positive impact on Latin America’s immense social problems. President Kennedy also struck below the border with brass knuckles. He had inherited from the Eisenhower administration a CIA-backed scheme to topple Fidel Castro from power by invading Cuba with anticommunist exiles. On April 17, 1961, some twelve hundred American-armed exiles landed at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. When the ill-starred Bay of Pigs invasion (Definition = CIA plot in 1961 to overthrow Fidel Castro by training Cuban exiles to invade and supporting them with American airpower. The mission failed and became a public relations disaster early in John F. Kennedy’s presidency.) bogged down, Kennedy stood fast in his decision to keep hands off, and the bullet-riddled band of anti-Castroites surrendered. The Bay of Pigs blunder, along with continuing American covert efforts to assassinate Castro and overthrow his government, naturally pushed the Cuban leader even further into the Soviet embrace. Wily Chairman Khrushchev lost little time in taking full advantage of his Cuban comrade’s location just ninety miles off Florida’s coast. In October 1962 aerial photographs by American spy planes revealed that the Soviets were secretly and speedily installing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. Kennedy and Khrushchev now began a nerve-racking game of “nuclear chicken.” The president flatly rejected air force proposals for a surgical bombing strike against the missile-launching sites. Instead, on October 22, 1962, he ordered a naval quarantine of Cuba and demanded immediate removal of the threatening weaponry. He also served notice on Khrushchev that any attack on the United States from Cuba would trigger nuclear retaliation against the Russian heartland.For an anxious week, Americans waited while Soviet ships approached the patrol line established by the U.S. Navy off the island of Cuba. The world teetered breathlessly on the brink of global atomization. Only in 1991 did the full dimensions of this nuclear peril become known, when the Russians revealed that their ground forces in Cuba already had operational nuclear weapons at their disposal and were authorized to launch them if attacked. In this tense eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, Khrushchev finally flinched. On October 28 he agreed to a partially face-saving compromise, by which he would pull the missiles out of Cuba. The United States in return agreed to end the quarantine and not invade the island. The American government also quietly signaled that it would remove from Turkey some of its own missiles targeted at the Soviet Union. Fallout from the Cuban missile crisis (Definition = Standoff between John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962 over Soviet plans to install nuclear weapons in Cuba. Although the crisis was ultimately settled in America’s favor and represented a foreign-policy triumph for Kennedy, it brought the world’s superpowers perilously close to the brink of nuclear confrontation.) was considerable. A disgraced Khrushchev was ultimately hounded out of the Kremlin and became an “unperson.” Hard-liners in Moscow, vowing never again to be humiliated in a nuclear face-off, launched an enormous program of military expansion. Kennedy, apparently sobered by the appalling risks he had just run, pushed harder for a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union. After prolonged negotiations in Moscow, a pact prohibiting trial nuclear explosions in the atmosphere was signed in late 1963. Another barometer indicating a thaw in the Cold War was the installation in August 1963 of a Moscow-Washington “hot line,” permitting immediate teletype communication in case of a crisis. Most significant was Kennedy’s speech at American University in Washington, D.C., in June 1963. The president urged Americans to abandon a view of the Soviet Union as a Devil-ridden land filled with fanatics and instead to deal with the world “as it is, not as it might have been had the history of the last eighteen years been different.” Kennedy thus tried to lay the foundation for a realistic policy of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. Here were the modest origins of the policy that later came to be known as “détente” (French for “relaxation of tension”).