Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse - Softcover

Blight, James G.; Allyn, Bruce J.; Welch, David A.

9780742522695: Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0742522695 ISBN 13: 9780742522695

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and international socialism, Cuba now finds itself isolated as the United States continues to press for its economic and political collapse. How Fidel Castro sees Cuba's plight and what he hopes to do about it emerge from this account of a unique conference held in Havana in 1992. The meeting brought together participants in the Cuban missile crisis from the former Soviet Union, Cuba, and the U.S. to discuss its causes and course. This account is now available for the first time in paperback, on the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This first meeting between Castro, his ex-Soviet allies, and his American foes produced startling revelations about his dealings with the Soviets, chilling details of the number and kind of Soviet nuclear arms that Cuba possessed in 1962, and an illuminating account of Castro's view of the American threat--then and now. The dramatic exchanges between Castro and such conference participants as Anatoly I. Gribkov, former head of the Warsaw Pact; former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Special Assistant to John Kennedy, reveal misperceptions on all sides that led us to the brink of nuclear war.

An extraordinary examination of an international crisis, Cuba on the Brink illustrates the ongoing "Cuba problem," and will help guide our actions toward other countries deemed hostile to our national interest.

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About the Author:

James G. Blight is professor of international relations (research) at the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Institute for International Studies, Brown University. Bruce J. Allyn is senior analyst and chief of the Moscow Office of Monitor, Inc. David A. Welch is CIGI Chair of Global Security, Balsillie School of International Affairs, and professor of political science at the University of Waterloo.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Verbatim proceedings from a blockbuster Havana-based 1992 conference on the Cuban missile crisis of 1963, plus interpretive commentary by a team of down-to-earth scholars led by Brown University's Blight and also including Allyn (Harvard Law School) and Welch (University of Toronto; coauthor with Blight of On the Brink, 1989). The conference--fifth in a series that began in 1987--featured an all-star cast (including, for the first time, representatives from the erstwhile USSR) who played leading roles in the dramatic Kennedy/Khrushchev confrontation that brought the world far closer to nuclear holocaust than had previously been imagined. Among those on hand were Fidel Castro; Ray Cline (sometime supervisor of the CIA's photographic intelligence center); General Anatoly Gribkov (operational director of the USSR's 1962 placement of IRBMs in Cuba); Robert McNamara; Arthur Schlesinger; and Oleg Troyanovsky (a US-educated diplomat who counseled the Politburo on American intentions). With high-caliber participants freely speaking their minds, the four-day symposium generated both heat and light that cut through the fog of a virtual conflict. It turns out that the Kremlin's decision to deploy missiles in Cuba owed at least as much to a desire to defend the island nation against the possibility of US aggression as to the goal of redressing a perceived imbalance in the hemispheric placement of strategic weapons. Also new is the disclosure that, when Kennedy intervened, atomic warheads already had been delivered and were ready for installation. The annotated transcripts of the gathering's electric colloquies give readers a ringside seat at a consequential debate, while Blight and his fellow academics offer thoughtful analyses of the geopolitical predicaments in which Castro was entangled then--as well as now, with his onetime superpower ally having effectively ceased to exist. Oral history of a high and enlightening order. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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