Missile Crisis Research Articles

Money Creation and Excess Liquidity in Cuba: A Monetary Circuit Analysis

The 1989 crisis in Cuba translated into the accumulation of real internal disequilibria, with large impacts in both the fiscal and the monetary environments. As in most transition economies, monetary manifestations included a repressed inflation in the regulated market; price increase in the informal economy; and an excess accumulation of money in the hands of households. Monetary dynamics in Cuba are difficult to explain using traditional economic instruments. The paper presents an interpretation of these disequilibria from a monetary circuit point of view, showing that the excess liquidity in the hands of the population results from a real shock and has its counterpart in the fiscal or quasi-fiscal deficit and the accumulation of unpaid bills among firms.

Retiring Hitler and “Appeasement” from the National Security Debate

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. have an obligation to call this what it is--the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history. President George W. Bush (1) It is high time to retire Adolf Hitler and appeasement from national security debate. The repeated analogizing of current threats to menace of Hitler in 1930s, and comparing diplomatic efforts to Anglo-French placating of Nazi dictator, has spoiled true meaning of appeasement, distorted sound thinking regarding national security challenges and responses, and falsified history. For past six decades every President except Jimmy Carter has routinely invoked Munich analogy as a means of inflating national security threats and demonizing dictators. Presidents and their spokespersons have not only believed analogy but also used it to mobilize public opinion for (2) After all, if enemy really is another Hitler, then force becomes mandatory, and sooner it is used better. More recently, neoconservatives and their allies in government have branded as appeasers any and all proponents of using nonviolent conflict resolution to negotiate with hostile dictatorships. For neoconservatives, to appease is to be naive, cowardly, and soft on threat du jour, be it terrorism, a rogue state, or a rising great power. To appease is to be a Chamberlain rather than a Churchill, to comprise with evil rather than slay it. The Munich analogy informed every major threatened or actual US use of force during first two decades of Cold War as well as decisions to attack Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Munich conditioned thinking of almost every Cold War President from Harry S. Truman to George H.W. Bush. For Truman, analogy dictated intervention in Korea: Communism acting in Korea just as Hitler and Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, twenty years earlier. (3) A year after Korean War ended, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, citing domino effects of a Communist victory in French Indochina on rest of Southeast Asia, invoked Munich in an appeal for Anglo-American military action. We failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini, and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time.... May it not be that [we] have learned something from that lesson? (4) President John F. Kennedy invoked Munich analogy during Cuban Missile Crisis, warning that taught us a clear lesson: Aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked, ultimately leads to war. (5) Munich indisputably propelled United States into Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson told his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, that if United States pulled out of Vietnam, the dominoes would fall and a part of world would go Communist. (6) Johnson later told historian Doris Kearns that everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through streets of Saigon, then I'd be doing exactly what [Neville] Chamberlain did.... I'd be giving a fat reward to aggression. (7) President Ronald Reagan saw in Soviet Union a replay of challenges democracies faced in 1930s and invoked Munich analogy to justify a major US military buildup, intervention in Grenada, and possible intervention in Nicaragua. One of great tragedies of this century, he said in a 1983 speech, was that it only after balance of power allowed to erode and a ruthless adversary, Adolf Hitler, deliberately weighed risks and decided to strike that importance of a strong defense realized. (8) Similarly, George H.W. Bush saw Saddam Hussein as an Arab Hitler whose aggression against Kuwait, if unchecked, would lead to further aggression in Persian Gulf. In announcing dispatch of US forces to Saudi Arabia in response to Saddam Hussein's conquest of Kuwait, he declared, If history teaches us anything, it is that we must resist aggression or it will destroy our freedoms. …

Sergio del Valle Jimenez

Sergio del Valle Jimenez

The Subjectivity of Eyes in the Sky: Understanding Remote Sensing through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 2003 Build-Up to War in Iraq

This essay examines how meaning is subjectively derived from remotely sensed images of the earth obtained from airplanes or satellites. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the US build-up to war with Iraq in 2003 are used as case studies to demonstrate the dangers of ascribing a scientific objectivity to such imaging systems. The essay concludes by acknowledging the rhetorical nature of interpreting scientific images and calling for a more rhetorically informed perspective of such ostensibly logos-driven images.

Maintaining the Status Quo: U.S. Response to Chinese Nationalist Mainland Recovery Efforts, 1961–1963

When the Kennedy administration came to office, the president and his advisers confronted immediate and critical issues such as the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, renewed antagonisms with the Soviet Union over the status of Berlin, and negotiations for a nuclear disarmament treaty; still, they could not ignore China policy. Domestic and international circles burgeoned with speculation. John F. Kennedy and his cabinet projected images of “new frontiersmen” who promised to offer fresh and innovative solutions to problems around the world. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., special assistant to the president, described Kennedy as “the first representative in the White House of a distinctive generation, the generation which was born during the First World War, came of age during the depression, fought in the Second World War and began its public career in the atomic age.” But the course of Sino-American relations would be determined not by New Frontier intentions but by interactions with, and resulting perceptions of, the government of the Republic of China (GRC) and the People's Republic of China (PRC).

The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations in Cuba, 1959–1965 (review)

Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations in Cuba, 1959-1965. Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2006. 320pp.In this book, The Castro Obsession, the former Latin American editor of the Miami Herald, Don Bohning, provides a good, concise overview of the efforts by the United States to remove Fidel Castro from office in the period 1959-1965. While treading over ground covered by others such as Peter Wyden, Bohning nevertheless succeeds as an investigative reporter in writing a good synthesis of the efforts that began with the Eisenhower administration and finally subsided with the election of President Lyndon Johnson and the shifting of attention to southeast Asia.Bohning covers the traditional topics such as the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, and CIA activities in Miami, highlighting a cast of larger-than-life American and Cuban characters, ranging from those approximating James Bond to others more closely resembling Maxwell Smart. Ultimately, the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars and, according to the author, instead of ridding the hemisphere of Castro, the covert campaign undoubtedly contributed to maintaining and consolidating his control over (1).The book opens with a review of the Bay of Pigs invasion and its spectacular failure. Immediately, President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy figure prominently in the narrative, especially the latter, though both shared the obsession with Castro. Chastised by those who argued against the Bay of Pigs as well as those within the military and Cuban American community who felt the president should have used U.S. forces to help the invasion, the Kennedy brothers made me feud with Castro personal. To underscore the point, Bohning incorporates materials from interviews with Americans such as Jake Esterline and Jack Hawkins as well as Cuban perspectives provided by Erneido Oliva, Rafael Quintero, and Carlos Obregon.The subsequent section deals with Operation Mongoose and efforts to destabilize the Castro government through operations ranging from intelligence gathering to sabotage and finally several botched assassination attempts. Characterizing many of the attempts as nutty schemes (93), the author uses long-disclosed sources including the Church Committee hearings and National Security Archive materials to tell the familiar story of the Mafia's efforts to assassinate Castro as well as CIA efforts to provide poison to close confidants of the Cuban leader. The Cuban Missile Crisis effectively eliminated many of the operations when Kennedy promised no invasion of Cuba in return for the removal of missiles.Despite the promises, the U.S. government remained active in trying to depose Castro, and Miami became a hot spot in the cold war. The CIA and other government agencies worked out of the University of Miami's South Campus in a series of front companies such as Zenith Technical Enterprises. …

The 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty: A Missed Opportunity for Détente?

The fragile détente that dawned after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was a necessary but not sufficient condition to ensure the conclusion of the Limited Test Ban Treaty eight months later. Nikita Khrushchev's political weakness after his Cuban fiasco was the main obstacle. New evidence from the Soviet side shows that by April 1963—three months before John F. Kennedy's conciliatory speech at American University that is usually regarded as the turning point—the Soviet leader became committed to the treaty in principle. Discord within the Communist world inhibited him from pursuing it actively until efforts to mend the rift with China collapsed, underscoring the value of a successful agreement with the West. Once the treaty was signed, however, the two sides failed to build on their common accomplishment and got bogged down by political issues that divided them. The opportunity for a deeper détente and a comprehensive test ban were lost.

Iran and the West: A Symposium

IRAN Michael W. Doyle p REVENTING IRAN from acquiring nuclear weapons is desirable. But is it vitally necessary or just desirable? Is it doable, and, if so, at what cost? Answers to those questions will explain why I think we should try to prevent, but settle for deterring. Prevention is not a radical policy. It is fully legal when authorized by the UN Security Council under Article 39 of the Charter, which calls upon the Council to determine "threats" to international peace and decide what to do about them. The Council imposed preventive sanctions on South Africa in 1977 to punish apartheid and prevent a regional race war. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962, the United States unilaterally—illegally but arguably justifiably—imposed a blockade to prevent the Soviet Union from making Cuba into a missile base threatening the United States. Responsible governments regularly face the choice of whether to try to deter a potential foe or to act first—that is, preventively—to save themselves from a blow that the other seems to intend, has delivered before, and could again deliver. The international community is beginning to develop a jurisprudence of prevention focusing on lethality, likelihood, legitimacy, and legality —criteria that help assess the seriousness of threats not yet imminent and the appropriate responses to them. • Lethality identifies the likely loss of life if the threat is not eliminated. • Likelihood assesses the probability that the threat will occur. • Legitimacy covers the proportionality, necessity , and deliberativeness of proposed responses . • Legality asks whether the threatening situation is itself produced by legal or illegal actions, and whether the proposed remedy is more or less legal. All four standards should be taken into account when considering prevention. Absent good reasons relevant to each standard, preventive action is not justified. Preventing an Iranian bomb is clearly desirable , judging by those 4Ls, but not an immedi46 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 ate vital necessity. Lethality is fortunately not imminent. Iran is four to ten years away from nuclear weapons according to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. But there is a long-run lethal threat. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, judges that Iran is at least seeking a "screwdriver" bomb, one that would be a week or so away from assembly in a crisis. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threats to "wipe Israel off the map" and Iran's arming of Hezbollah clearly threaten Israel. Annual "Death to America" celebrations and the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that housed U.S. airmen convey continuing threats to the United States. Current threats may be so much hot air; but it is disturbing that, knowing how provocative they have been, Ahmadinejad has repeated them time and again. m UCH MORE LIKELY than a direct attack on either Israel or the United States (which would be met with an overwhelming response) is Iran's continued funding , arming, and directing of Hezbollah. Iran could also tilt the regional balance of power in ways that threaten the world economy. The Bush administration eliminated Iran's regional containment by creating power vacuums in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were once the barrier walls to Iranian expansion. All Iran needs is nuclear capability to serve as an umbrella over a much more adventurous and coercive policy toward the Persian Gulf and its cheap oil that fuels and controls world prosperity. With regard to legality, Iran's threats themselves violate the UN Charter (Article 2.4). But Iran's current attempts to acquire a nuclear fuel reprocessing capability appear to be within the scope of peaceful energy in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iranian threats have generated responses that reveal a rising level of concern. Various Israeli officials off the record and Vice President Dick Cheney on the record say, "We join other nations in sending that regime a clear message. We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." IRAN What is missing is a response that is both effective and legitimate—one that is proportionate to the threat. Even a Middle East hawk such as Kenneth Pollack who (in The Gathering Storm) made the case for war against Iraq, argues (in The Persian Puzzle...

Presidential Recordings Program, http://www.whitehousetapes.org/. Created and maintained by the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Re-viewed Sept.-Nov. 2006

In 1998 the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia began its Presidential Recordings Program, an effort to transcribe and annotate the five thousand hours of tape recordings made by presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Richard M. Nixon. Led by the esteemed historian Timothy Naftali (who recently left to run the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, as that once-private institution becomes an official National Archives-run presidential library), a team of knowledgeable scholars has used state-of-the-art equipment and software to decipher and explain the discussions, arguments, gossip, maunderings, rantings, and ravings of our chief executives. W.W. Norton has already published collections of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson transcripts, along with subject-specific studies of the Cuban missile crisis and the civil rights movement. More are expected. Some of those books—particularly the Cuban missile crisis records, by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, which were done independently of...

"No Basis for Suspicion Election May Be Rigged": The Johnson Administration, the CIA, and the Caribbean, 1964–1968

The editors—Daniel Lawler, Carolyn Yee, and General Editor Edward C. Keefer—of this new volume in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series chose to begin their presentation of documents with an essay, “Note on Covert U.S. Actions.” The editors wanted to provide readers with “some organizational context on how covert actions and special intelligence operations in support of U.S. foreign policy were planned and approved within the U.S. Government.” The editors reviewed the evolution of committees within the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations that approved and monitored covert interventions. The “5412 Committee” of the Eisenhower years became, for example, the “303 Committee” during the Johnson presidency. In providing this historical context to covert operations, the editors made a wise decision. Between 1964 and 1968, U.S. policymaking toward nations in the Caribbean basin—Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guyana (British Guiana), and Haiti—primarily consisted of covert operations and interventions. When Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency in late November 1963, he inherited a violent U.S. policy in the Caribbean. As he would later exclaim in a post-presidential interview, “We were running a damned Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean.”1 The United States had attacked Fidel Castro's Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose, and assassination plots. The war against Castro continued after the Cuban missile crisis. President John Kennedy or “Higher Authority” personally approved sabotage and terrorist attacks on Cuba in June and November 1963. On 22 November 1963, CIA agents rendezvoused in Paris with a traitorous Cuban official, Rolando Cubela Secades, code-named AM/LASH, and passed to Cubela a ballpoint pen rigged with a poisonous hypodermic needle. The Kennedy administration had not limited its war to left-wing leaders. It backed various schemes to oust François “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1957–1971), the odious tyrant of Haiti, and had assisted Dominican conspirators who assassinated Rafael Trujillo (1930–1961), the vicious and venal dictator of the Dominican Republic. The Kennedy administration also relentlessly attacked the government of Cheddi Jagan (1957–1964) of British Guiana. CIA agents, working through the AFL-CIO labor organization, fomented riots and strikes that precipitated appalling racial and ethnic violence between Guyanese of African and Indian (South Asian) heritages.2

Education in Cuba—an alternative educational discourse: lessons to be learned?

This article focuses on the Cuban education system, which is well known for its focus on inclusion and equality of opportunity, but also for its focus on political and ideological conformity. The economic crisis in Cuba has led to an educational crisis as well, both in terms of teacher shortages and a decrease in quality and in political/ideological commitment. In 2001 a comprehensive transformation of the education system in Cuba was introduced. This transformation followed in the wake of ‘the battle of ideas’, a campaign introduced to mobilize the youth for the defence of the revolution. The article critically examines the ideas and ideology behind the transformation policy and discusses the problem of ideological exclusion, despite the inclusiveness of the system (free education). Education in Cuba has not received a cent from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund since the revolution, but is still reputed to have one of the best school systems (if not the best) in the developing world. The article discusses this claim (what is meant by best?) and examines the lessons to be learnt from the Cuban educational experience. Its uniqueness in a global perspective—what the author defines as cultural capital more or less universally distributed—represents an alternative educational route that ought to be studied carefully by other countries in both the south and north.

1962 and all that

Dr Chippendale concludes his anecdotal look back at the Lancaster and district medical scene of 1962, the year he arrived in Lancaster. It was the year of the Cuban missile crisis, Pope John XXIII was Time magazine’s person of the year, Sean Connery debuted as James Bond and Mike Sarne asked Wendy Richards to ‘Come Outside’. 1962. That was the year that was. In this article, Dr Chippendale describes the work of the Morecambe and Heysham general practitioners and concludes the hospital section focussing on the psychiatrists, and the Moor Hospital.

Shared Dreams and Red Cockroaches: Cuba and Digital Culture

Antique trumpets warming up. Castanets. Yuleidys. Udelvis. Hacer patas, i.e., leave a trace. Who will just sit and chat balanced on the edge of evanescence. Those long trails of graphic footprints left on vellum. No running water. There is no on and off, only degrees of change. No place for pedestrians: walking is simply a dance in and out of traffic. Boca as in bocadillos. Un contestador. Guarnicion a su eleccion. With the money from my rent, they bought a sink! You can see it in an oscillograph.-Loss Pequeno Glazier, Territorio libre.Digital culture in Cuba is a sphere of overlapping zones of expression and experiences. These zones form a complex structure made up of individuals, commerce, and the state. The resulting geography reveals the movement of capital, the power of stakeholders, and spaces of intimacy. It is a map of interrelated consciousness. As such, Cuban digital culture depends on local histories and characteristics and responds to transnational exchanges and relays. While living within infrastructures of power and technology, people use digital technology to sense the world, build creative social experiences that reshape the virtual contours, and produce new infrastructures. What are these digital Cuban environments? Where can they be found? What do they tell us about ways of living and learning that develop despite controls on information and activity? How do new networks of culture help people adapt to changes triggered by globalization? What new forms of knowing, language, and art arise out of this complex web of elements? The following essay answers these questions, finding clues inside public spaces (hotels, government buildings), underground spaces (black market), and in the hardware or the architectural core of computer networks.Spaces of appropriation and tensions left over from the Cold War are good places to begin a survey of digital Cuba. Until 2001, the Soviet Union and, later, the Russians had the largest radar base in the Western hemisphere, located in the Cuban locality of Lourdes. At first glance the site appeared to be a normal residential neighborhood of five-story block apartment buildings characteristic of the anonymous Socialist high-rises built during the post-1959 period. However, an enormous parabolic antennae and a military zone designation signaled that this was no typical communal housing sector. Rather, it was the Lourdes Radar Base, where Russians listened to telephone conversations, intercepted faxes, and followed United States military movements, communicated with their atomic submarines in this part of the world and with their embassies throughout America (Carlos). They also shared the information with Cuban Intelligence agents. Established in 1964, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the base became a strategic location for both the Soviets and the Cubans. Data gathered about the Americans brought Cuba a measure of national security.Thirty-nine years later, in October 2001, and under the specter of September 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the closure of the Lourdes Base, which by then was set to bring in 200 million dollars in rent to Cuba. The money was never paid, and President Putin, under pressure by the Bush administration, and to the dismay of Russian generals, scheduled the immediate dismantling of the base. Reminiscent of past transformations of spaces and their uses (like Ciudad Libertad, a major educational center that had previously been the Columbia Military Base in Marianao and the symbol of military rule under Batista), the forty-five square mile secret compound was transformed by 2002 into UCI, the twenty-first-century high tech University of Information Sciences, where 6,000 students now live while they study to become part of the worldwide informatics labor force. Investing heavily in the education of software programmers and engineers, Cuba has transformed the Cold War listening post and its military and strategic purpose into a classroom for future civil information experts. …

Una diplomacia defensiva: la política exterior española en el Caribe y el golfo de México entre 1865 y 1878

The Spanish foreign policy in the Caribbean during the middle of nineteenth century was directed to the construction of several counterbalances that diminished the United States pressure against Cuba. The failure of the Spanish projects in Mexico and Dominican Republic during the reign of Elizabeth II and the outbreak of Cuban crisis had influence in the Spanish foreign policy during the Sexenio and the Restauracion and converted to the Caribbean in a vital zone for the Spanish diplomacy. This situation moved to Spain to try to normalize his diplomatic relations with the Hispanic American states which, from their independence, had suffered the agressive or indifferent attitude from the old colonial metropolis.

“Pearl Harbor in Reverse” Moral Analogies in the Cuban Missile Crisis

During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the argument that U.S. air strikes against Soviet missile sites in Cuba would be morally analogous to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 had a major impact on policymaking. The invocation of this analogy contributed to President John F. Kennedy's decision to forgo an immediate attack on the missiles and to start instead with a naval blockade of the island. The “Pearl Harbor in reverse” argument is an example of an important phenomenon that has received little attention in foreign policy analysis—the moral analogy. Fusing together elements of moral and analogical thinking, the moral analogy can be a powerful force in shaping policy preferences, as it was in October 1962.

The Missiles of November, December, January, February…: The Problem of Acceptable Risk in the Cuban Missile Crisis Settlement

This article examines how the Kennedy administration assessed the risk posed by Soviet short-range missiles in Cuba and the associated combat troops, particularly in the months after the peak of the Cuban missile crisis. The issue had a strong domestic political subtext that played out for months. Missiles in Cuba had been a topic of discussion well before the dramatic events of October 1962, and the dispute about them dragged on well past the famous “thirteen days.” Many studies assume a final resolution to the crisis that did not actually exist. The evidence from this period indicates that domestic political considerations were a fundamental factor in Kennedy's decision-making and apparently induced him to take a slightly harder line in the post-crisis negotiations with the Soviet Union than he otherwise might have. But the evidence also suggests that Kennedy was more willing than some of his advisers and many Congressional critics to accept a degree of permanent military risk in Cuba.

Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity. CHRISTINE AYORINDE, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004.

The topic of Ayorinde's book is timely considering the public emergence of Afro-Cuban religions during the years since the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe and the ensuing economic crisis in Cuba. While a number of studies have approached Afro-Cuban ethnicity from historical and (to a lesser extent) sociological perspectives, Ayorinde's book offers an account of the political significance of Afro-Cuban cultural heritage in the historical formation of Cuban national identity.

The role of motivation, responsibility, and integrative complexity in crisis escalation: Comparative studies of war and peace crises.

Drawing on D. G. Winter's (1993) comparison of 1914 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the author identified 8 paired crises (1 escalating to war, 1 peacefully resolved). Documents (diplomatic messages, speeches, official media commentary) from each crisis were scored for power, affiliation, and achievement motivation; text measures of responsibility and activity inhibition; and integrative complexity. Aggregated effect-size results show that war crises had significantly higher levels of power motivation and responsibility, whereas peace crises showed trends toward higher integrative complexity and achievement motivation. Follow-up analyses suggested that these results are robust with respect to both sides in a crisis, type of material scored, and historical time. The power motive results extend previous findings, but the responsibility results suggest that responsibility plays a paradoxical role in war. Future research directions are sketched, and the role of psychological content analysis in monitoring the danger of war is discussed.

Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe

Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe

Canadian Involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis Re- Reconsidered

L'année 2008 marque le quarante-sixième anniversaire de la crise cubaine de missiles. Cet incident a amené le monde au bord de la guerre nucléaire, a changé le cours des événements mondiaux et continue à nous fasciner. Il demeure à la vue publique à travers un flux continu d'analyses fraîches, de nouveaux comptes rendues venant des participants et de documents nouvellement déclassés par les gouvernements. Tout ceci provoque, de temps à autre, la question très raisonable, "avons-nous appris quoi que ce soit de neuf?" Les opérations anti-sousmarins conduites par les forces maritimes américaines et canadiennes posent toujours quelques mystères et elles sont ainsi toujours intéressantes à réexaminer. Cet essai constitue une telle réflexion, en grande partie d'une perspective canadienne.