Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

He was full of complaints about General Pliyev and his staff. He told Alekseev that Soviet commanders lacked basic information about the American military buildup. They had only found out the details of the naval blockade a day after it came into force. They were accustomed to the classic rules of war, such as they had known in World War II, and did not understand that this was going to be a very different kind of conflict. The short distance between Cuba and America meant that U.S. planes would be able to destroy the Soviet missile sites with very little warning, even without using nuclear weapons. There was little Soviet and Cuban air defenses could do to prevent a devastating strike.

The way Castro saw it, a conventional war was likely to escalate very quickly into a nuclear exchange. As he later recalled, he “took it for granted that it would become a nuclear war anyway, and that we were going to disappear.” Rather than submit to an American occupation, he and his comrades “were ready to die in the defense of our country.” He had no problem authorizing the use of tactical nuclear weapons against American invaders, even if it meant poisoning Cuba for generations to come. He and other Cuban leaders understood very well that “we would have been annihilated” in the event of nuclear war. They would perish “ con suprema dignidad.”

As usual with Fidel, it all came back to dignidad. But there was also an element of political calculation in his preoccupation with death and sacrifice. His entire geopolitical strategy was based on raising the cost of an invasion of Cuba to the point of unacceptability to the United States. Accepting the unacceptable and thinking the unthinkable were key to his survival strategy. Nuclear war was the ultimate game of chicken. If Castro could convince Kennedy and Khrushchev that he was willing to die for his beliefs, that gave him a certain advantage. Since he was the weakest of the three leaders, stubbornness, defiance, and dignidad were his only real weapons.

It was impossible to tell with Castro where dignidad ended and political calculation took over. His overriding goal was ensuring the survival of his regime. This was the reason why he had accepted Soviet missiles in the first place. He had long since concluded that the United States was implacably opposed to his vision for Cuba. The Bay of Pigs was merely the forerunner of more serious attempts to get rid of him. His best hope of deterring an invasion was to place Cuba under the Soviet nuclear umbrella. Once nuclear missiles were installed and operating in Cuba, the yanquis would never dare invade.

On the other hand, Castro did not want to appear too indebted to the Soviet Union or leave the impression that Cuba was incapable of defending itself. So he wrapped his decision to accept Khrushchev’s offer of nuclear missiles in a high-sounding justification. He informed Soviet envoys that he would accept Khrushchev’s offer not because he was desperate for the protection provided by the missiles but to “strengthen the Socialist camp.” In other words, he was doing Moscow a favor rather than the other way round.

Alekseev knew Castro better than any other Soviet official or foreign diplomat. Nicknamed “Don Alejandro” by the Cubans, he enjoyed extraordinary access to Fidel, first as a KGB agent and later as Soviet ambassador. But the Cuban leader remained for him an enigma.

On a personal level, Alekseev was under Fidel’s spell. He regarded Castro as the reincarnation of his childhood political heroes who had ensured the triumph of the Russian Revolution. He admired his single-mindedness and enjoyed his easygoing informality. But he also knew from personal experience that the Cuban leader was quick to take offense. He would seize on a tiny detail and make a huge issue out of it. The idea of Communist Party discipline, which was everything for an apparatchik like Alekseev, mattered little to an autocrat like Castro. In dispatches to Moscow, the ambassador attributed Castro’s “very complex and excessively sensitive” personality to “insufficient ideological preparedness.” The Cuban leader was like a willful child, easily swayed by his emotions. Alekseev was unaccustomed to revolutionaries who hung crucifixes on their walls and invoked the power of the Virgin Mary.

Like his political masters in Moscow, Alekseev was willing to overlook Castro’s ideological idiosyncrasies. Just as Fidel needed the Soviets, the Soviets needed Fidel. They had not protested in the slightest earlier that year when Castro purged a group of orthodox pro-Moscow Communists led by Anibal Escalante. Ideological purity was less important than the reality of political power. The way Alekseev saw it, Castro was “the main political force” in Cuba and the personification of the revolution. Without Castro, there probably would have been no revolution. “Therefore, we should fight for him, educate him, and sometimes forgive him his mistakes.”

Alekseev, whose Spanish was good but not perfect, struggled to keep up with the torrent of thoughts pouring out of Castro in the predawn hours of Saturday morning. One of his assistants jotted down a few phrases in Spanish and handed the paper to another aide for translation into Russian. But they had to begin all over again after Castro expressed unhappiness with the draft.

Fidel was having difficulty articulating exactly what he wanted Khrushchev to do. At times, it sounded as if he wanted his Soviet allies to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States. At other times, he seemed to suggest that they should use nuclear weapons in self-defense if Cuba was attacked. As one draft followed another into the burn bin, Alekseev went to the code room and dictated a holding telegram:

TOP SECRET.

TOP PRIORITY.

F. CASTRO IS WITH US AT THE EMBASSY AND IS PREPARING A PERSONAL LETTER FOR N.S. KHRUSHCHEV THAT WILL BE SENT TO HIM IMMEDIATELY.

IN F. CASTRO’S OPINION, THE INTERVENTION IS ALMOST INEVITABLE AND WILL OCCUR IN APPROXIMATELY 24-72 HOURS.

By Soviet standards, the nuclear test planned for the morning of October 27 was a relatively small device, with the explosive power of around twenty Hiroshima-type bombs. Like most Soviet airborne tests, it would be conducted at Novaya Zemlya, high above the Arctic Circle. An appendix-shaped pair of islands roughly the size of Maine, Novaya Zemlya was a perfect spot for atmospheric testing. The native population of 536 Eskimos had been resettled on the mainland after 1955, their places taken by military personnel, scientists, and construction workers.

Both the Soviet Union and the United States had conducted hundreds of nuclear tests since the explosion of the first atomic bomb on July 16,1945. The dawning of the nuclear age had been announced by a flash of brilliant light across the desert of New Mexico followed by the formation of an expanding mushroom cloud. For one eyewitness, it was “the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you.” The father of the bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, was reminded of the line in Hindu scripture from the God Vishnu: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Everybody was aware that “a new thing had just been born.”

In the seventeen years since that first test, named “Trinity” by Oppenheimer, the secret of Armageddon had spread from America to Russia to Britain to France. More and more countries were clamoring to join the nuclear club. During a presidential election debate with Richard Nixon in October 1960, Kennedy worried that “ten, fifteen, or twenty nations…including Red China” would possess the bomb by the end of 1964. But that fear did not prevent him from vigorously competing with the Soviet Union to develop ever more destructive types of nuclear weapons.