Playing Global Dominos: 20 Years after Cuban Missiles Crisis

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TWENTY years ago, in October 1962, the Kennedy administration in the USA embarked upon a desperate showdown with the Kruschev bureaucracy in the Soviet Union. It was widely if not universally believed that the world was lon the brink of a nuclear war.

Publicly humiliated by the catastrophic failure the CIA-run 'Bay of Pigs' invasion of Cuba in April 1961, Kennedy had been press-ganged into a confrontation with Moscow by intelligence reports of a build-up of Soviet mediumrange missiles in Cuba capable of striking targets deep in the USA itself.

Kennedy issued an ultimatum demanding their withdrawal, coupled with a full-scale blockade of Cuba by the US navy, with orders to stop a convoy of Soviet ships bringing further missiles.

The world waited with bated breath. Was this to be the final few minutes of buman history?

In the event Kruschev dimbed down on the missiles issue - in exchange for guarantee from Kennedy that the USA gould make no further moves to invade Cuba. Millions breathed again -and a new stage in world politics had arrived.

With the Cuban regime educed to the tole of an Impotent bystander as the Kremlin negotiated with Washington over their heads, the Soviet bureaucracy had firmly emerged into the field of global politics.

A decision to embark on • nuclear war with the USA • 1962 had in fact alwavs been out of the question: he USSR was outnumbered 10-1 by American nuclear weapons.

But its growing military night and political influence lad meant that for the first time the Soviet bureaucracy lad become a political force not just in the vast borderng territories of the Soviet Union itself - in Europe and Isia - but on a world scale Indeed the conduct of he missiles crisis itself howed that Soviet influence ras in the main restricted lot so much by the inadepuacy of Moscow's nuclear #senal as by the outright ipposition of the Stalinist reaucracy in the Kremlin mobilising the most owerful potential ally of he Cuban revolution - the international working class.

Committed to securing he nationalised property elations upon which theft lower and privileges as a parasitic ruling • caste depends, Kruscher and his Kremlin colleagues remained equally fearful of arousing the revolutionary potential of the workers' movement in struggles which might escape their control.

As a result, they followed essentially the same strategy as Stalin before them combining brutal repression of their working class at home with a general orientation towards peaceful coexistence with imperialism.

They took military meas ures to protect their own borders, and from time to time utilised opportunities to gain military or diplomatic advantage over imperialism where this could be done without provoking a direct confrontation.

It seems clear that in the attempt to instal the missile bases in Cuba, Kruscher was enringmanship - to test the engagıng resolve of the Kennedy administration.

The stakes were high. Had the US imperialists not taken a firm stand on the issue, Kruschev would have gained a substantial strategic coup' with the establishment of a 'forward' base as close to the USA as the NATO bases in Europe are to the USSR.

In other words the episode had far more to do with Soviet defence than with any defence of Cuba itself -for which no such elaborate weaponry was needed.

But even after "defeat" on this ploy, Kruschev was able to extract a pledge for the future security of Cuba which helped cement the uneasy relationship between Fidel Castro's initially anticommunist leadership and Moscow.

The Bay of Pigs episode also pointed to the newly emerging situation facing imperialist rulers in their attempts to police the world. 1949 had seen the triumph of the Chinese revolution and 1953 the defeat of imperialist forces in Korea and the rout of the French army in the Vietnamese battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Despite the successful CIA-backed coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), the tide was plainly flowing against the imperialist rulers and in favour of the. colonial liberation struggle. The 1959 Cuban revolution, carried through under the noses of the American imperialists, proveu strong enough to withstand external subversion - and was able to turn for economic and military assistance to the USSR Since then the USA has 10 Le dering with nuclear fire - Khrushcher and Krnnid:

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