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Health & Fitness

The Soviet Mission to Cuba: May 28, 1962

How the USSR persuaded Castro to accept Soviet missile bases on Cuban soil.

Twenty-second in a Series Chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

Objectives of the Soviet Mission to Cuba

On May 20, 1962, Khrushchev wisely decided that a mission, not a letter, would be the better way to secure Castro’s all-important approval for Soviet missile bases in Cuba.  

The Soviets’ need for Cuban missile bases was self-evident—to them. Those bases would, in one stroke,

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  1. enable the USSR to launch nuclear strikes on most of the United States, thus ending America’s ability to act without fear of nuclear reprisal;
  2. goad a newly vulnerable United States to abandon Berlin;
  3. “pay back” the United States for those missiles in Western Europe aimed into the Russian Homeland; and
  4. firmly establish the USSR as Cuba’s patron, thereby denying the Chinese a role in the Western Hemisphere.

These were Soviet needs, however. Khrushchev and his colleagues hoped that the always touchy Castro would quickly see that strategic missile bases in Cuba would nicely protect Cuba from the U.S. invasion that Havana and Moscow had convinced each other was inevitable.

If Castro accepted, Khrushchev’s single nuclear gamble would meet five needs—“five at one blow,” as it were.

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Secrecy—Secrecy—Secrecy

Khrushchev’s envoys were Alexandr Alekseev, Ambassador-designate to the Cuban government; R. Rashidov of the Uzbekistan Central Committee; Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, commander of the USSR’s Rocket Forces; and General Ivanov from the General Staff.

At an informal meeting of the Presidium and his envoys, Khrushchev emphasized the need for secrecy until after the American elections in November. Then he would travel to the United States and himself inform Kennedy of America’s new and humiliating vulnerability!

Interestingly, Khrushchev also told his guests that he had no intention of ever using the strategic missiles to be based in Cuba. He just wanted to make the American people fear Soviet missiles as badly as the Russian people feared the NATO missiles ringing the Russian heartland.

Maskirovka Worked!

The mission left the USSR on May 28, 1962, fifty years ago this Memorial Day.

The generals were wearing civilian clothes. Rashidov’s, Biryuzov’s, and Ivanov’s documents identified them as the irrigation experts Cuba had requested months before. They arrived in Cuba on May 29.

This maskirovka (deception) worked perfectly. If U.S. intelligence agencies even knew of the mission’s presence in Cuba, they were oblivious to its real purpose until long after the fact.

Castro Accepts the Missiles

The Soviet mission’s job was quickly accomplished. It was almost as if Castro had already made up his mind.

 On the second day of meetings (May 30), after a ritual delay "for consultation," Castro accepted the Soviet missiles. He did so under one condition,  however: that the new missile bases be portrayed as Cuba’s contribution to the cause of international socialism. Put thus, Cuba would appear as the USSR’s benefactor, rather than as a defenseless nation desperately seeking protection.

The Next Steps toward the October Crisis

Before they returned to Moscow, the Soviet delegation hastily inspected possible missile sites in northwestern Cuba, where the island lies closest to the United States. Back in Moscow, Marshall Biryuzov told Khrushchev that the missiles would be hidden from spy planes by Cuba’s forests. There were (and are) no forests in that part of Cuba.

Before the Soviet delegation left for home, Raúl Castro, Cuba’s defense minister, was designated to travel to Moscow to negotiate details of the missile deployment. He would go in July.

Email the author at: phufstader@sbcglobal.net.

Sources

For details of the Soviet delegation’s mission to Cuba, I have consulted:

  1. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble.” Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, esp. pp. 181-183. For details of Khrushchev’s pep talk to the departing delegation, the authors cite a 1993 interview with Boris Ponomarev, a functionary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU). They discuss Castro’s face-saving rationale for accepting the Soviet missiles on p. 187.
  2. Norman Polmar and John Gresham, DEFCON-2: Standing on the Brink of Nuclear War during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006 (citing Fursenko and Naftali). The authors discuss Biryuzov’s ridiculous forest theory on p. 32.
  3. Lawrence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Document Reader. New York: The New Press, 1998, 364.

I add this personal note: in October 1961 President Kennedy had authorized a deputy secretary of defense to tell the world that Khrushchev’s years of boasting about the USSR’s nuclear superiority had been nothing but lies. The USSR had never had anything with which it could hit the United States, let alone “a fly in space.” This world-wide exposure of his lies had humiliated the bumptious premier. Khrushchev must have salivated over the prospect of doing the same to Kennedy.

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