The Cuban Missile Crisis Myth: 49 Years Later
By Humberto Fontova
On October 31, 2011 @ 12:02 am
In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 1 Comment
Forty nine years ago on Oct. 28th JFK “solved” the Cuban Missile Crisis. Given the influence of Camelot’s court scribes and their cronies in the mainstream media, perhaps a refresher on conservative reaction to this “solution” is in order:
“We locked Castro’s communism into Latin America and threw away the key to its removal,” growled Barry Goldwater.
“Kennedy pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory,” wrote Richard Nixon. “Then gave the Soviets squatters rights in our backyard.”
“We’ve been had!” yelled then Navy Chief George Anderson upon hearing on October 28, 1962, how JFK “solved” the missile crisis. Adm. Anderson was the man in charge of the very “blockade” against Cuba.
“The biggest defeat in our nation’s history!” bellowed Air Force Chief Curtis Lemay, while whacking his fist on his desk.
“We missed the big boat,” said Gen. Maxwell Taylor after learning the details of the deal with Khrushchev.
“It’s a public relations fable that Khrushchev quailed before Kennedy,” wrote Alexander Haig. “The legend of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation invented by Kennedy’s men paid a handsome political dividend. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev deal was a deplorable error resulting in political havoc and human suffering through the Americas.”
Even Democrats despaired. “This nation lacks leadership,” said Dean Acheson, the Democratic elder statesman whom Kennedy consulted on the matter. “The meetings were repetitive and without direction. Most members of Kennedy’s team had no military or diplomatic experience whatsoever. The sessions were a waste of time.”
But not for the Soviets. “We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along,” snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his diaries:
– security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy’s death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba (emphasis added).
Khrushchev seemed prepared to yank the missiles even before any “bullying” by Kennedy. “What?” he gasped that week, as recalled by his son Sergei. “Is he [Fidel Castro] proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba? But that is insane!…Remove them [Soviet missiles] as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” instructed the Soviet premier.
The Kennedy team’s brainstorming sessions were certainly no waste of time for the primary beneficiary. “Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said,” snickered Fidel Castro. “Perhaps one day they’ll be made public.”
“We can’t say anything public about this agreement. It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us.” That’s what Robert F. Kennedy said to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin when closing the deal that ended the so-called crisis.
Castro’s regime’s was granted new status. Let’s call it MAP, or Mutually-Assured-Protection. Cuban freedom-fighters working from South Florida were suddenly rounded up for “violating U.S. Neutrality laws.” Some of these bewildered men were jailed, others “quarantined,” prevented from leaving Dade County. The Coast Guard in Florida got 12 new boats and seven new planes to make sure Castro remained unmolested, that not a hair on his chiny chin-chin was harmed by the hot-headed exiles. When some moved the bases of the liberation fight to the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, the adamantly “non-interventionist” Camelot liberals suggested (strongly) to these governments that the Cuban freedom-fighters be booted out.
JFK’s Missile crisis “solution” also pledged that he immediately pull the rug out from under Cuba’s in-house freedom-fighters. Raul Castro himself admitted that at the time of the Missile Crisis his troops and their Soviet advisors were up against 179 different “bands of bandits” as he labeled the thousands of Cuban anti-Communist rebels then battling savagely and virtually alone in Cuba’s countryside, with small arms shipments from their compatriots in south Florida as their only lifeline.
“Gaddafi, you poor, stupid sap,” Castro must be snickering.
Think about it: here was the U.S. Coast Guard and Border Patrol working ’round the clock arresting Hispanics in the U.S. who were desperate to return to their native country.
It’s a tribute to the power of Castroite mythology that, even with all this information a matter of public record for almost half a century, the academic/media mantra (gloat, actually) still has Castro “defying ten U.S. presidents.” Instead he’s been protected by them.
Perhaps a refresher on what preceded this crisis is also in order:
On October 14, 1962 JFK’s national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, appeared on ABC’s “Issues and Answers” to rebut hysteria from some tinfoil-hatters of the time. “Nothing but refugee rumors,” sneered Bundy regarding reports from Cuban-exiles about Soviet missiles going up in Cuba.
For months, Cuban freedom-fighters (mostly youths and college kids) had been risking death by KGB-tutored torture and firing squads by infiltrating Cuba to obtain these eyewitness reports of missiles and passing them to the CIA and U.S. State Department.
“Nothing in Cuba presents a threat to the United States,” continued the Ivy League luminary Bundy—barely masking his scorn for these hot-headed and deceitful Cubans. “There’s no likelihood that the Soviets or Cubans would try and install an offensive capability in Cuba,” he scoffed.
“There’s fifty-odd-thousand Cuban refugees in this country,” added President Kennedy himself the following day, “all living for the day when we go to war with Cuba. They’re the ones putting out this kind of stuff.”
Exactly 48 hours later U-2 photos sat on JFK’s desk revealing that those “refugee rumors” were sitting in Cuba and pointed directly at Bundy, JFK and their entire staff of sagacious Ivy League wizards.
Much of his fame in the Third World, on college campuses (especially among faculty) and in Europe stems from the fable of Castro “defying” a superpower. In fact, he survived because of a sweetheart deal that allowed him to hide behind the skirts of two superpowers.
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