The Cuban Missile Crisis

863 Words2 Pages

Teddy Baziotis
Cuban Missile Crisis

As prominent leader Fidel Castro took over in Cuba and introduced major reforms, many Cubans fled to America and brought stories with them that outraged the American press (History Learning Site). America now decided that they would stop all trade with Cuba and that is when Russia came in to buy Cuba’s sugar and other exports that were previously going to America. This event drove Castro to support Russia (History Learning Site). The Cuban Missile Crisis started on October 16th when an American spy plane took photographs over Cuba and saw obvious missile bases. These missiles were later revealed to be nuclear (History Learning Site). The US had repeatedly warned the Soviets not to place nuclear weapons in Cuba and the Soviets had assured them that they wouldn’t do that and told the US that Cuba would only receive non-nuclear weapons for the defense of their island (The Cuban Missile Crisis, Considering its Place in Cold War History). Nobody knew what Russias and Cubas intentions were putting these missiles there. Theodore Sorensen, one of President Kennedy’s close advisors said “The only honest answer I have is, I don’t know now, and I didn’t know then. None of us knew. We could only speculate about what Khrushchev was up to” (The Cuban Missile Crisis…). The US were clueless about what Cuba and Russia were going to do with those missiles and their main objective was to get them out.

People in the White House agreed that the nuclear weapons in Cuba would be a huge threat to the security of the U.S and American territory would be quite vulnerable to nuclear missiles (The Cuban Missile Crisis…). At first, President Kennedy decided to keep this knowledge of the missiles secret from the public whi...

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...o the U.S, maybe they would have found some way to figure it out because Russia ended up having to take their bombs away anyways so maybe it was worth a try asking the U.S and they could have came to and agreement. There also could have been more communication throughout the crisis and I think that if that had been maintained the would have been more on the same page. I also observed that it was not a good idea for Cuba to participate in this in the first place because they ended up on top of losing their missiles, their relationship with the USSR crumbled when it fell and they lost a lot of economic support. I think next time, Cuba should probably ally with someone like maybe the US that is not across the world and has a much steadier government unlike Russia. The Cuban Missile Crisis teaches a lot of lessons to leaders back then and people learning about it today.

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