Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

Commander Ecker flew on to Washington, where he was summoned, still in his flight suit, to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff in their Pentagon conference room. Curtis LeMay was unhappy that the Air Force had been upstaged by the Navy, which was equipped with better cameras and generally considered to be better at low-level reconnaissance. When Ecker apologized for his rough appearance, the Air Force chief removed his cigar and scowled at him. “You’re a pilot, damn it, you’re meant to be sweaty.”

Fernando Davalos, the Havana University student mobilized the previous night, spotted the jets as his military convoy headed west, toward San Cristobal. It was a gorgeous morning, and the sun glinted off the wings of the planes, temporarily blinding him. He thought the planes must be Cuban, flying into a nearby air base.

Valentin Polkovnikov had a similar reaction. The Soviet missile forces lieutenant was standing at a checkpoint at the San Diego site when he saw a plane with a white star emblazoned on its fuselage flash overhead. He knew that the Cuban air force used the white star emblem. The star was an American emblem as well, of course, but it was hard to imagine the imperialists being so brazen.

It did not take long for phones to ring, and for higher-ups to demand greater “vigilance.” Surprise quickly turned to shame. There was a huge psychological difference between high-level and low-level flights. For most Cubans, the U-2s were merely dots in the sky, distant and impersonal. The Crusaders were a national humiliation. It was as if the Americans were taking a sadistic delight in flying over Cuba whenever they wanted. Some Cubans saw—or thought they saw—the yanqui pilots rock their wings in derisory greeting.

At the Soviet air force base at Santa Clara, MiG-21 pilots also expressed frustration about the overflights. “Why can’t we retaliate?” complained one pilot. “Why are we stuck here like sitting ducks?” The generals pleaded for patience. They had orders not to fire. For the moment.

There seemed little doubt that the Americans could bomb the missile sites whenever they wanted. It was practically impossible to disguise sixty-seven-foot-long objects. They could be covered with canvas and palm fronds, but the shape was still visible. Before deploying the missiles, aides had assured Khrushchev that they could be hidden among the palm trees. What a joke, thought Anatoly Gribkov, the General Staff representative. “Only someone with no military background, and no understanding of the paraphernalia that accompanied the rockets themselves, could have reached such a conclusion.”

The most Soviet commanders on Cuba could do was order a crash program to bring all the missiles to combat readiness as quickly as possible. Soviet soldiers were accustomed to Stakhanovite labor campaigns, organized bursts of mass enthusiasm designed to “fulfill and overfulfill the plan.” Fortunately, the R-12 regiments were almost at full strength. By October 23, 42,822 Soviet soldiers had arrived in Cuba—out of a planned deployment of around 45,000.

Overnight, the missile sites swarmed with laborers. It took one regiment three and a half hours to erect the first semicircular beam for a nuclear warhead shelter. The pace picked up, and the entire shelter—forty beams in all—was completed in thirty-two hours. The shelters were designed to withstand a blast of 140 pounds per square inch.

The Cuban topsoil was so rocky that much of the digging had to be done by hand. Touring the missile sites, General Gribkov was shocked to see soldiers using pickaxes and shovels to clear land that resisted the efforts of bulldozers and tractors. He noted bitterly that the Soviet Union had shipped “some of the most sophisticated military technology of the age” to Cuba, but remained “shackled” to the Russian soldier’s proverb: “One sapper, one axe, one day, one stump.”

In the afternoon, the weather changed abruptly, and a cold north wind began to blow. The wind sent waves crashing across the Malecon in Havana, drenching marching militiamen with plumes of powdery spray. Soldiers were already erecting antiaircraft guns outside the venerable Hotel Nacional, where Lucky Luciano had once held summit meetings with other mafia bosses and luminaries from Winston Churchill to Errol Flynn had sipped daiquiris.

All day, little groups of people gathered on the stone walls of Havana’s seafront boulevard, gazing expectantly northward as they scanned the horizon for the silhouettes of American warships. Curtains of wind and the rain crashed down along the coast, emphasizing the island’s isolation. Following Kennedy’s quarantine speech and Castro’s mobilization order, the island was effectively sealed shut. Only official vehicles were permitted on the main roads. Civilian air traffic had been suspended indefinitely, including the daily Pan American flight between Havana and Miami.

For months, the Cuban middle classes had been lining up at Havana Airport to board the Pan Am plane, and make a new life for themselves in America. Dubbed “the ninety milers,” the refugees were willing to abandon everything—homes, cars, jobs, even their families—to escape the revolution. Now even this lifeline had been severed, leaving opponents of the regime with a stifling sense of claustrophobia.

“Other people are deciding my life, and there’s nothing I can do,” the Cuban intellectual Edmundo Desnoes would later write in Memories of Underdevelopment, a novel set against the background of the Cuban missile crisis. “This island is a trap.”

But most Cubans seemed unperturbed by the country’s isolation. Overnight, tens of thousands of posters had appeared on the streets of Havana and other Cuban cities, showing a hand clutching a machine gun. A LAS ARMAS , the slogan read, in large white letters—TO ARMS.

“The poster—one color, three words, one gesture—summed up the instantaneous reaction of the Cuban people,” wrote a sympathetic Argentinean eyewitness, Adolfo Gilly. “Cuba was one man and his rifle.”

FIDEL HABLARA HOY AL PUEBLO, blared the headline in Revolucion that morning. FIDEL WILL SPEAK TO THE PEOPLE TODAY.

The flashbulbs popped in the Oval Office as Kennedy signed the two-page proclamation authorizing the U.S. Navy to intercept, and if necessary “take into custody,” Soviet ships bound for Cuba with “offensive weapons.” He wrote his full name—John Fitzgerald Kennedy—with a smooth flourish. The quarantine would come into force at 10:00 a.m. Washington time the following day. To project a sense of international legality, Kennedy had delayed issuing the edict until his diplomats secured a 19 to 0 vote of approval from the Organization of American States (OAS).

Seated behind the Resolute desk, a white handkerchief jutting out of his breast pocket, with the Stars and Stripes behind him, he was the image of presidential determination. But that was not how he felt. He had been questioning his advisers all day about what would happen when U.S. warships came head-to-head with Soviet vessels, and was disturbed by the thought of everything that could go wrong. If the U.S. Navy tried to board a Soviet ship and the Russians fired back, the result would likely be “quite a slaughter.”

Dean Rusk had mentioned the “baby food” scenario a few moments earlier. A Soviet ship comes along and refuses to stop. The Americans use force to board it, but a public relations disaster ensues when all they find is a shipment of baby food.

“We shoot three nurses!” mused McGeorge Bundy.

“They’re going to keep going,” the president reasoned. “And we’re going to try to shoot the rudder off, or the boiler. And then we’re going to try to board it. And they’re going to fire a gun, then machine guns. And we’re going to have one hell of a time getting aboard that thing…. You may have to sink it rather than just take it.”