JFK had promised in his inaugural address that ‘In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom’ – code for fighting Communism – ‘in its hour of maximum danger. I don’t shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.’ Khrushchev too sought a way to raise the stakes, but unexpectedly he found his opportunity in the Americas when another pair of brothers took power just ninety miles from Miami.
BROTHERS: THE CASTROS AND THE KENNEDYS
On 9 January 1959, the thirty-three-year-old cigar-chomping, bearded Fidel Castro, El Comandante, assisted by his dourer brother Raul, who directed the military, rode into Havana. The Castros were illegitimate but well-educated sons of a sugar planter, a self-made Spanish immigrant who had amassed 25,000 acres; they had been taught by Jesuits, imbibing St Ignatius’ ‘All dissidence is treason.’ Fidel became a doctor of law but embraced revolution (‘if I could be Stalin’), first joining an abortive coup in Bogotá, then, disgusted by Batista’s return to power, leading the attack on the Moncada Barracks, Santiago. The brothers were captured.
Castro became famous, treating the court to a grandiloquent oration – ‘History will absolve me’ – but the brothers only escaped being shot thanks to their connections: Castro’s wife was the sister of Batista’s interior minister. When he discovered after his imprisonment that she too had joined the Interior Ministry, he divorced her; politics was all. He was verbose and loquacious, even his brother Raul complaining that in prison he never stopped talking for weeks on end.
When American pressure forced Batista to release him, Fidel fled to Mexico City, where he met Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, a handsome, asthmatic doctor, son of a rich Argentine family. ‘Extraordinary’, said Castro, ‘a person of great culture, great intelligence … a doctor who became a soldier without ceasing to be a doctor’. The two talked all night.
In November 1956, the brothers plus eighty-one half-trained fighters boarded a leaky boat, the Granma, and landed in Cuba. They were heavily bombarded, and only nineteen of the eighty-one survived, but the Castros and their barbudos – bearded ones – launched a guerrilla war in which they were three times almost annihilated but, aided by the remoteness of the Sierra Maestra, survived. Thanks to Batista’s corruption, arrogance and ineptitude, plus surprisingly some misguided CIA funding, the legend and successes of the Fidelistas grew. Castro himself met a young guerrilla, Celia Sánchez, a doctor’s daughter, who became his lover and aide. At the darkest moments, when they had just twelve fighters left, ‘Celia was with me.’
As Batista fled with millions, in January 1959 Castro set up headquarters in Havana’s Hilton Hotel, ruling with Raul as war minister, Che as education minister and Celia, in whose tiny apartment he lived, as secretary of the council of ministers. Those on a death list of enemies were shot. ‘We’re not executing innocent people,’ Fidel insisted, just ‘murderers and they deserve it’. American fruit tycoons and Mafia kingpins were driven out.
The Castro brothers ruled together, but they were opposites: Fidel, an egomaniac showman and bloviating strategist; Raul, cautious and meticulous. Fidel was nicknamed El Caballo – the Horse – favouring one-night stands with admirers from abroad, particularly dazzled French liberals; Raul was inseparable from his wife Vilma. Yet they spoke several times a day and, when the regime was settled, they lived next to each other on Punto Cero, a heavily fortified estancia outside Havana. Fidel’s office contained a portrait of José Martí, a signed photograph of Ernest Hemingway (‘I read For Whom the Bell Tolls three times’) and one of his own father.
Castro initially saw himself more as a Latino Alexander the Great (he named several of his sons Alexander) than as a Lenin, but, he explained, ‘I had a compass – Marx and Lenin.’ In February 1960, Khrushchev sent his ally Anastas Mikoyan to Havana. Mikoyan, a tough Armenian ex-seminarist who had survived the inner circles of Lenin and Stalin, advised Khrushchev to support Castro. The combination of the impulsively manic ex-miner Khrushchev and the highly strung, narcissistic Cuban intellectual was about to bring the world to the edge of catastrophe.
Kennedy inherited CIA plans to invade Cuba. On 17 April 1961 his invasion, using 1,400 Cuban émigrés and a few American planes, landed at the Bay of Pigs but was easily repelled by Castro: although hundreds of Castro’s militia were killed, he captured a thousand of the émigrés, and executed hundreds. ‘Thanks for Playa Girón,’ he wrote to JFK, referring to the beach where the raiders had landed. ‘Before the invasion, the revolution was weak. Now it’s stronger.’ JFK soon sacked Allen Dulles from the CIA.* Although he had despised the Mafia corruption in Havana, even sympathizing with Castro, he ordered the Cuban’s liquidation – with Mafia assistance. The CIA recruited Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante and Giancana. At least eight attempts, including poisoned diving gear, cigars, toothpaste, failed. ‘There were dozens of plans,’ said Castro, ‘some close to succeeding,’ but ‘chance sometimes intervened against them’. Khrushchev was unimpressed by Kennedy.
Inconsistency was the only consistent thing about Khrushchev. On 4 June 1961, the two men met in Vienna, where the pugnacious Khrushchev almost crushed JFK, twenty-three years younger but medicated for his back pain. ‘If the US starts a war over Germany,’ Khrushchev shouted, ‘let it be so’ – a chilling moment in a depressing encounter. ‘It’s going to be a cold winter,’ concluded JFK. He was crestfallen. ‘He just beat the hell out of me,’ he said. But he hardened himself.
Khrushchev mocked JFK as ‘very inexperienced, even immature’. He first hoped to force Kennedy out of west Berlin. ‘Berlin is the testicles of the west,’ said Khrushchev, ‘every time I want the west to scream, I squeeze.’ But the testicles survived the squeezing. It was his front-line satellite, East Germany, a grim totalitarian dystopia policed by the omniscient Stasi, that was fragile. So many citizens were escaping to western plenty that Khrushchev ordered the building of the Berlin Wall to confine its people. Now he mulled over Kennedy’s threat to Cuba. ‘The most important consideration in the power struggle of our time’, he decided was that ‘those with weak nerves go to the wall’. He would test those nerves. ‘It’s like playing chess in the dark.’
INSTALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN CUBA: THE MILLIONAIRE’S WHORE AND THE IMMORAL GANGSTER
After the Bay of Pigs, ‘one thought’, recalled Khrushchev, ‘kept hammering away at my brain, “What if we lose Cuba?”’ In May 1962, he had an idea for his comrades: ‘Fidel would be crushed if another invasion were launched,’ but if he placed ballistic missiles on Cuba ‘such a disaster’ could be prevented, plus they would ‘equalize the balance of power’: the Americans had just installed missiles in Türkiye, right on his borders. The grandees acquiesced before the bombastic Khrushchev, but Mikoyan had a question. The Americans would strike the missiles: ‘What are we supposed to do then – respond with a strike on US soil?’ Mikoyan was overruled. ‘Install nuclear rocket weapons. Transport secretly. Disclose later,’ recorded the minutes. ‘This will be an offensive policy.’