Sleepwalking Towards War
Castro’s coming to power in 1959 worried the United States. Castro had embraced the communist ideology and had developed close ties to the Soviet Union, our mortal enemy at the time. The U.S. pursued aggressive tactics to get rid of Castro. In April of 1961, the CIA in conjunction with Cuban exiles launched a daring amphibious assault in Cuba to overthrow Castro’s regime. The CIA believed that with the help of civilian sympathizers and US airpower the overthrow would be successful. The operation became a disaster when support failed to materialize, and Kennedy pulled the plug on US air cover. After the disastrous CIA backed amphibious assault in the Bay of Pigs in which all the paramilitaries were either killed or captured, Castro further cemented his power as an astute military commander and a hero who stood up to the advances of a superpower. According to Alexander Dawson “after the failed invasion at the Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) on April 17, 1961, he could rightly claim to have repelled an American invasion. In the face of such a compelling heroic narrative, moderates who called for elections could be dismissed as bourgeois dupes, traitors to the Revolution who would allow an intractable enemy to weaken the nation by fomenting electoral discord.” (249).
After the humiliating failure of the operation, the United States doubled down on trying to get rid of Castro. Castro grew closer to the Soviet Union and in 1962 the world became terrified when it was discovered that Castro had allowed the Soviets to place nuclear missiles in the island, this incident came to be known as the Cuban missile crisis. President Kennedy was presented with several options one of which called for the invasion of Cuba by the U.S. military. According to documents declassified in 2017 “The U.S. military drew up plans to occupy Cuba and establish a temporary government headed by a U.S. “commander and military governor”. President Kennedy wrestled with the idea of whether to strike and risk further escalation towards nuclear war or establish a blockade while engaging in diplomacy to defuse the crisis. During the crisis, Castro was so convinced a U.S. invasion would occur that he implored Nikita Khrushchev to initiate a nuclear attack against the United States which he quickly dismissed. This episode further reinforces the dangerous thinking by both sides which precipitated the crisis. Castro became so paranoid by past U.S government actions against him that he was willing to call for the use of nuclear weapons. After Castro came to power the U.S was so staunchly against him that by pursuing his overthrow at all costs they cemented Castro’s belief that the only way to keep the US at bay was to place nuclear weapons on the Island as a deterrence from further meddling. This insane scalation had to do with the fact that both sides vilified the other and chose to believe that for preservation sake we had to take the most drastic measures. Both countries convinced each other the other was beyond the effort of diplomacy which was not true. Thankfully, President Kennedy’s and soviet leader Khrushev’s pursuit of diplomacy brought us back from the brink, and a full-out war was avoided.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuba/2017-10-16/cuban-missile-crisis-us-planned-military-occupation-1962