The Real Gap in the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Post-Cold War Historiography and the Continued Omission of Cuba

Abstract

Readers from the United States or Britain may not be aware that the events which they refer to — axiomatically — as the Cuban Missile Crisis were known in the Soviet Union as the Caribbean Crisis, and in Cuba itself as the October Crisis. These variations in name are not without significance. For the United States, the fact that the Soviet missiles were placed in Cuba had a particular import above and beyond the island’s geographical proximity to the US mainland. This factor can only be understood in the context of an analysis that goes far further back into the lengthy history of US involvement in Cuban affairs than the Bay of Pigs fiasco of April 1961, which is when many accounts tend to stop. In some standard works on the missile crisis, it is still insufficiently acknowledged that the histories of Cuba and the United States have been closely intertwined at least since the late nineteenth century, when the United States famously launched what became known as the Spanish-American War to end a stalemate in Cuba’s second war of independence (1895–8) and oust the Spanish from the Americas. Arguably, the story of US intervention in Cuba begins a full century before that, when US merchants started to exploit Spain’s increasing inability to preserve a trading monopoly in its colonies.KeywordsUnited StatesFull CenturyNineteenth CenturyInternational RelationGeographical ProximityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.