The Cuban missile crisis is one of the most studied historical events. In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear and conventional war. The earliest historiography of the crisis was completed by journalists such as Elie Abel and Soviet scholars such as Arnold L. Horelick. After the Soviet and American archives were opened, historians, such as the Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis, took on the project of correcting myths and providing a more complete picture of the crisis. The opening of the archives and meetings between the two belligerents and Cuban leaders, such as Castro, speaking about the crisis for the first time in the 1990s, gave rise to the postcolonial analysis about the crisis from scholars such as Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes. Although new evidence and data emerged about the crisis, American popular media continued to perpetuate myths about the crisis, which has led historians such as Sheldon Stern to take these myths to task to revise the long-held myths about John and Robert Kennedy.  It is widely believed among both journalists of the 1960s and historians that Kennedy’s response letter to Nikita Khrushchev’s Friday and Saturday letters ended the crisis in peace. Yet, there are discrepancies as to how that process unfolded. After the crisis ended, who could claim victory? According to the sources below, both belligerents claimed victory. As such, this essay will summarize five accounts of the crisis, then examine how the historiography changed over time, how different academic disciplines addressed the crisis, how the American response to the Soviet’s two letters developed, and who won the crisis.

Arnold L. Horelick is a specialist on Russian foreign policy and international security, and his World Politics 1964 essay The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and Behavior focuses on the objectives of the Soviet Union and the calculations before and during the crisis. Horelick asserts that some critics of Kennedy’s administration claimed that it was acting recklessly, and some claimed that it acted too cautiously during the crisis. This is because the Soviets achieved much of what they intended to. Horelick puts doubt on the claim that it was an objective of the Soviets to insert nuclear weapons in Cuba as leverage for the removal of the weapons from Turkey. It would not have taken the deployment of missiles to Cuba to come to an agreement for the U.S. and Turkey to withdraw the Jupiter missiles that were stationed in Turkey. Horelick makes the point that Khrushchev’s impromptu letter requesting the removal of the weapons was a moment that he could cease to help his reputation among the Soviet leaders. The primary objective for the insertion of the offensive weapons in Cuba was to get the US to make a pledge to not invade the island. If the plan was to convince the United States not to invade Cuba, the plan went terribly wrong as Kennedy made plans to order airstrikes and invade Cuba if the weapons were not immediately removed. 

Prior to the crisis, the Soviet Union, as Horelick explores, made several calculations of sending the weapons to Cuba. American leaders understood they held strategic superiority, however, they were “strongly disinclined to initiate general war so long as the Soviet Union avoided extreme measure of provocation [such as the deployment of nuclear weapons off the coast of Florida] that could not be dealt with by other means.”[1] The failed Bay of Pigs invasion in early 1961, may have signaled to Soviet leadership American aggression toward Castro, but, that American leaders were not willing to use the full might of military forces to completely control the island, meaning that Soviet missile emplacement might have been tolerated. Furthermore, American attempts to oust Castro pushed Castro to seek military assistance from the Soviets. The Soviets, according to Horelick, may have expected that, even after Kennedy issued statements demanding no interference from the Soviets in the Western Hemisphere, if the weapons could quickly (and secretively) become operations in Cuba, the Americans would accept the weapon’s presence. 

During the Crisis, the Soviets, under extreme pressure from the United States and the Organization of American States (OAS), turned their attention to new objectives and calculations. The October 26 private letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy may have been an indicator that the calculations that the Soviet leaders had made prior to sending the weapons to Cuba were ill conceived and that yielding to the American government was the best option to prevent war. Horelick offers six calculations the Soviets possibly considered during the crisis: (1) the American government “had more freedom of choice and action than the Soviet leaders probably foresaw,” (2) Kennedy quickly ordered a quarantine of Cuba, (3) the quarantine shifted perception of the escalating belligerent to the Soviets, (4) The US secured “unanimous support for the quarantine in the OAS” which could have been the cause for the Soviet strategy of waiting for the weapons to be completed to fall apart, (5) Kennedy addressed Khrushchev directly while ignoring Castro which possibly led to the Soviets to act more decisively, and (6) the Kennedy administration moved much more quickly than the Soviet leaders expected.[2] Horelick concludes his essay by asserting that Khrushchev, as it has been speculated by American scholars, was not attempting to save face during the crisis. This is because Khrushchev’s four years prior to the crisis were filled with blunders regarding West Berlin. Staying in the same decade, the journalist Elie Abel gives a similar, but less analytical, account of the events at the end of the crisis. 

Elie Abel was a journalist with NBC News, and his book The Missile Crisis gives an account of each day of the crisis. This essay will examine the last two chapters “Saturday, October 27” and “Sunday, October 28”. Abel begins “Saturday, October 27” by mentioning that after Khrushchev’s Friday night private letter of “apparent willingness to work out a reasonable settlement” the Executive Committee got to work on a response on Saturday morning.[3] The private letter addressed the concerns of Kennedy pledging not to invade Cuba if the weapons were removed. Khrushchev was asking for both belligerents to step back from the brink and to negotiate an end to the conflict. Then, without warning, Khrushchev upped the stakes by requesting that the missile in Turkey be removed if Kennedy wanted the missiles out of Cuba. The second letter seemed to be out of place because of its style and tone and it made the Executive Committee wonder if the secret letter was Khrushchev, but the public letter delivered on Saturday was Kremlin group think and that the Soviet leadership forced Khrushchev to up the stakes. According to Abel, the Soviet leadership could not have known that Kennedy had ordered the removal of the Jupiter missiles from Turkey when he entered office in January 1961. If these missiles had been removed, they could not have been used as leverage against the United States during the Crisis. 

Abel recounts the now widely debunked claim that it was Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General and brother to John F. Kennedy, that “suggested first brushing aside the broadcast letter and then responding to the secret letter of Friday night as if it were a valid proposal.”[4] Abel continues, Robert Kennedy drafted the letter that “accepted a set of terms Khrushchev had never formally offered.”[5] Robert Kennedy then delivered the letter to the Soviet ambassador and after the delivery the administration waited for a response. While they waited, they drew up plans to tighten the blockade and to airstrike Cuba. The next morning, Sunday, October 28, Khrushchev replied to Kennedy’s letter and agreed to a peaceful agreement which included the removal of nuclear missile and other Soviet military equipment from Cuba. Kennedy, in turn, agreed the United States would not invade Cuba. Interestingly, Abel makes no mention of the agreement to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey or of Robert Kennedy’s conversation with the Soviet ambassador Dobrynin. Now, we fast-forward thirty-one years to John Lewis Gaddis’ 1997 book We Now Know for a historian’s perspective on the crisis. 

John Lewis Gaddis has written extensively on the Cold War. We Now Know focuses on questions that were answered after the Russians released their Soviet archives in 1991. Gaddis’ chapter titled “The Cuban Missile Crisis” will be the focus of this essay. According to Gaddis, Khrushchev putting the missiles in Cuba was because it would protect Cuba from further American interference and aggression and because it would help the balance of strategic power. After the archives were opened on both sides, it was discovered that “Khrushchev understands more clearly than Kennedy that the West was winning the Cold War.”[6] Beyond the desire to balance the strategic power, Khrushchev also had a desire to help Cuba in any way possible. Gaddis makes a point to quote one of Khrushchev’s generals: the decision to send the missiles to Cuba “sprang from both [Khrushchev’s heart and his head.”[7] Gaddis makes an interesting observation of how Khrushchev’s idea about using nuclear missiles to defend Cuba, and not some other conventional weaponry or military units from American invasions, came from the Americans placing missiles in NATO countries of Turkey and Italy. The purpose for Eisenhower ordering the emplacement of nuclear missiles in those countries was that it could help those countries feel safe and give the Americans the strategic advantage. However, by the time the negotiations ended, the missiles that were placed in Turkey and Italy were obsolete.[8]

Gaddis asserts that Castro was under the impression that the Soviets had thousands of missiles, so when only a handful of missiles arrived, Castro felt slightly cheated, and his intentions inverted making them at odds with Khrushchev. Castro’s intentions were to create a strategic balance of power, with Cuban protections as an important second. Khrushchev, on the other hand, wanted to protect Cuba from American invasion to uplift a socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere, while making strategic power a close secondary objective. In the deployment of the missiles, Castro and Khrushchev were at odds again. Castro wanted the deployment of the missile to be made public because “Cuba had nothing to be ashamed of in accepting Soviet missiles,” whereas Khrushchev wanted to make a public announcement after the missiles become operational.[9]

The issue of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey was a real concern for the Kennedy administration. The emplacement of the missile gave Khrushchev and Castro political, emotional, and, as Gaddis highlights, possible legal authority to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. This was such a blunder on Kennedy’s part that Gaddis makes a pointed observation that “several of Kennedy’s own advisers worried about the implications for NATO if it should ever become known that he has sacrificed the Turkish Jupiters under pressure, went so far as to rewrite history by claiming that J.F.K. had ordered the weapons out earlier and that the State Department had failed to comply.”[10] Gaddis asks the questions, “who prevailed in the Cuban missile crisis?”[11] Because that question is one of the pillars of this essay, Gaddis’ response is important. He observes that the crisis led to the West’s “criteria for calculating Soviet power” narrowing “even as the Soviet Union’s capabilities for projecting power” also tightened.[12] In all, both sides of the conflict claimed victory, thus making it difficult to come to a direct conclusion. This question will be discussed momentarily, but, first, it is important to study the Cuban perspective, which is the task Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes attempt in their essay on the decolonization of the crisis. 

Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes are well regarded professors of International Relations from Europe, and their 2008 essay Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis gives the postcolonial perspective of the crisis and focuses on the Cuban view. They make the point, “A dominant narrative of the events of October 1962 emerged from the ExComm deliberations and for almost three decades defined the limits of scholarly and popular analysis of the missile crisis.”[13]Because of this, “Cuban actions and interests were irrelevant, making Cuba an omitted variable and generating unreliable analysis of the causes and dynamics of the crisis.”[14] International Relations scholars focus on the links between power, knowledge, and international hierarchy, and often the hierarchy of states is not just the actions of the various states, “but also in scholarly and popular analysis [and media] of world politics.”[15] This leads to the North Atlantic countries dominating the narrative of history such as the missile crisis. Often those countries in the lower echelons of international hierarchy are pushed out of the popular narrative, and those countries’ histories are not told or are told and influenced by the hegemonic countries. 

Regarding Cuba, the dominant narrative told the story that Cuba and its people were not involved in the crisis, but instead it was all about the Untied State and the Soviet Union. Before the archives were released, on both sides, analysis of Cuban accounts of the crisis remained largely ignored and marginalized. Most of the scholars from Europe and the United States focused on the American side of the crisis, with a few exceptions on the attempts to understand Soviet behavior, such as Arnold L. Horelick from above. In postcolonial work, the subaltern is generally unable to speak for themselves because of the hegemonic imperial power shutting them out of the narrative, in the case of Cuba and the United States, Cuba fits the role of the subaltern where its voice, even though it may be able to speak, is not as loud as the American government and American popular culture. Laffey and Weldes make the point that when scholars write about the missile crisis, Cuba is not seen as an agent of the crisis or as a Soviet proxy, but as a location, and Castro is seen as a nuisance to both powers.

Cuba, according to Laffey and Weldes, was much more of an agent in the ordeal than the popular narrative would let on. Castro’s rise to power and the influence of communism in the Western Hemisphere challenged the United States’ hegemony in the region. Throughout the Crisis, Cuba was seen as giving up its sovereignty to Khrushchev when it asked and accepted Soviet military assistance. The hierarchy of world power is most clearly displayed when the United States violated the sovereignty of Cuba by flying U-2s over the island believing it their right to protect their own country. Furthermore, the US dictated to Cuba and the Soviet Union what type of weapons could be placed on the island. In other words, the US was flexing its imperial muscle to forcefully tell two sovereign nations where they could place their weapons. 

Scholarly work and popular media on the crisis have been heavily in favor of the United States and designated Cuba and the Soviet Union as the enemy. Yet, much of the archival data from all three countries was lacking when scholars such as Graham Allison released his book Essence of Decision, or the numerous other works that were published before the archives, on any side, were released. The lack of Cuban perspective in scholarly works and popular media proves just how hierarchical history can be and does not paint a complete picture of events such as the Cuban missile crisis. It was not until October 2002, when the Cuban voice began to be heard, but it was a quiet voice compared to the domination of American and Russian voices. Laffey and Weldes conclude by observing that prior to the Havana meeting in 2002, “Castro and Cuba were practically invisible in a vast body of research on the Cuban missile crisis.”[16] That is the main point of Laffey and Weldes’ argument, being that Cuba, for over fifty years, have not had their voice heard, which is the purpose postcolonial studies. The postcolonial perspective is an important component to the study of the missile crisis because it brings to light the neglect of studying an important piece of the crisis: Cuba. One historian that believes in getting to the bottom of myths about the missile crisis is Sheldon M. Stern. 

Stern is a historian and author of multiple books on the crisis, and his book The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality tackles the popular myths of the crisis. This essay will focus on one chapter “The Trollope Ploy Myth” which debunks the widely held claim that it was Robert F. Kennedy, brother and Attorney General to John F. Kennedy, who came up with the concept to not response to Khrushchev’s second letter. For decades, RFK was considered to be the administration official that resolved the crisis with his “ingenious and cunning” diplomacy.[17] Stern makes the point that history of the crisis has been dramatized to make RFK out to be the hero of the President’s response letter to Khrushchev that solved the crisis. Historians, and ExComm officials alike, have perpetuated this myth, which up to 2008 was still not refuted. As Stern rightfully makes the case, “Several years later, anticipating a run for president in a nation bitterly divided by the Vietnam way, RFK was eager to take credit for hitting upon the path to peace in 1962.”[18] With no transcripts to prove any which way, RFK took credit for the Trollope ploy in his manuscript for a book that was posthumously published titled Thirteen Days. No one that was involved in Kennedy’s administration challenged the idea, and it remained as a common ‘fact’. 

Stern offers an explanation for why the Trollope ploy was used by explaining that the administration wanted a cover story for the process of responding to Khrushchev’s letter. President Kennedy did not want to publicly acknowledge the eventual withdrawal of the Jupiter missile in Turkey. Stern asserts that prior to Khrushchev’s second letter, the Kennedy administration anticipated that the weapons in Turkey may become a problem in the future. Administration officials had been “probing the Turkish option since October 18.”[19] Stern then uses a series of quotes from President Kennedy from the ExComm transcripts to make the case that JFK was adamant that to solve the crisis Turkish weapons would have to be removed. This led the administration to not be surprised when Khrushchev demanded in his second letter for a trade deal between the Jupiters in Turkey and the nuclear weapons in Cuba, which was one reason why Kennedy was adamant that to end the crisis, a trade deal should be the solution. 

The ExComm talked amongst themselves when Kennedy left the room at which point the committee came to the consensus that a Cuban-Turkish trade could not be the reply. When Kennedy returned, he made the point that the Turks could not make any public statements, and that the Turks should be consulted that if they did not remove the Jupiters and the Soviets did not remove the missiles in Cuba, that American military action in Cuba would cause the Soviets to begin military action in Turkey. In other words, the removal of the Jupiters was beneficial to all parties. McGeorge Bundy resisted the president’s idea of a trade deal and stated that he believed that NATO would be at risk if the US accepted Khrushchev’s offer. After arguing between Kennedy and ExComm, the president called several people into the Oval Office to explain that RFK was going to meet with the Soviet Ambassador. It was there that Dean Rusk “suggested that RFK should advise the ambassador that a public quid pro quo for the missile in Turkey was unacceptable but the president was prepared to remove them once the Cuban crisis was resolved.”[20]

In the end, the response letter from Kennedy did not ignore the Soviet proposal to remove the Jupiter missiles, as Robert Kennedy claimed, instead it left the issue open-ended for when the Cuban missile crisis was over. While RFK did play a significant role in the negotiations, which is odd because he was the President’s brother and Attorney General, he was not the sole person to come up with the Trollope Ploy. It was a concerted effort from most of the members of the ExComm, and, as Stern makes clear, “President Kennedy…stubbornly and persistently contended that Khrushchev’s Saturday offer could not be ignored, precisely because it had been made public.”[21] Even though the idea did not belong solely to RFK, the plan to address both letters, and to negotiate the Turkish weapons after the Cuban missile crisis, prevailed, nonetheless.  

With the analyses of the crisis summarized, it is now time to examine them to see the change over time and how the different disciplines addressed the crisis, beginning with the Trollope ploy. The Cuban missile crisis from the journalist perspective was very chronological. Elie Abel analyzed the crisis in the way of a storytelling, as would be expected from a journalist. Journalism is a story-telling profession where embellishments and biases are notorious, and journalists generally work with information that is closer in time to the event and is readily available to them. It is rare for journalists to comb through archival data when they are writing a story about an event only a few years old. As such, Abel was one of the earliest scholars to push the Trollope Ploy myth that Sheldon Stern debunks. Abel sees this as a highlight of the successful de-escalation of American-Soviet tensions. Abel writes, “It was Robert Kennedy who had suggested first brushing aside the broadcast letter and then responding to the secret letter of Friday night as if it were a valid proposal.”[22] It would take another thirty years for this myth to be debunked with the release of the ExComm transcripts. Abel pushed the notion that Kennedy had attempted to remove the missiles from Turkey upon taking office in January 1961. The truth as it turns out was much more complicated. Gaddis makes the point that the Eisenhower administration brokered a deal with the British, Italians, and Turks to have American missiles placed in their respective countries. Then upon assuming office in January 1961, “Kennedy came close to cancelling the Turkish deployment…altogether in the summer of 1961.”[23] This proves that Abel was either embellishing an assassinated Kennedy’s record or was receiving bad information from the member of the Executive Committee.   

Arnold L. Horelick wrote his essay The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and Behaviorstwo years before Abel wrote his book. Horelick, being an American expert on Soviet behavior, sought to answer some important questions about why the crisis happened. His essay does not follow the events in chronological order, but instead addresses objectives and calculations of the Soviet Union. Horelick asserts that a quid pro quo for the Turkish missiles was not the original intent for the Khrushchev to emplace the Cuban missile. The original intent was to prevent American aggression toward Cuba and Castro. This analysis seems to be correct in that “the Soviet leader gave first priority to defending Cuba; the strategic balance was, for him, an important but secondary consideration.”[24] Horelick asserts that the proposal to use the removal of the Jupiter missiles was improvised. It is possible that Khrushchev understood that it would be very difficult for him to win the missile crisis because how well the United States’ quarantine of Cuba had been executed. But if Khrushchev could extract a concession from Kennedy to not invade Cuba and remove the missile from Turkey it was a win-win for Cuba. 

The historian, unlike journalists, Soviet experts, and International Relations scholars, dives into archival data to debunk myths and to make the picture of an event ever clearer. Gaddis and Stern, both historians, used the archives to prove the points they wanted to make. Gaddis, a Cold War historian, provided more Cuban and Soviet perspective than many other accounts of the crisis. Abel, and American popular culture such as the film Thirteen Days, is heavily biased toward the American perspective and narrative. Comparatively, Gaddis in his book We Now Know, chapter “The Cuban Missile Crisis” dedicates a section on the Cuban-Soviet relationship which is uncommon for American historians. Sheldon Stern’s book focuses entirely on debunking American mythology surrounding the crisis. The common American historical narrative and popular culture has perpetuated myths about John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. Myths such as the Trollope ploy are important to debunk because it provides a better historical understanding and narrative of important events such as the Cuban missile crisis. 

Finally, Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis is an important essay in the study of the crisis because it helps to incorporate Cuba even further into the conversation, and it assists in showing weaknesses in the current historical narrative. American scholars tend to not address the imperialism of American actions when studying American foreign policy. All too often, Americans will look past it and use the names of locations of events without scratching the surface to uncover what the people of the locations were thinking or doing during an event. This is a central theme in Laffey and Weldes essay. They argue that just as the colonial powers of Europe shut their subjects out of the hegemonic narrative, likewise the United States shut Cuba out of the conversation for the first three decades after the crisis. During the crisis, Castro and the Cuba were not seen as agents during the ordeal, instead they existed only as identifiers to promote American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere—Castro as the embodiment of communism and Cuba as the proximity to the United States. It was not until 2002 when Cuba finally was given—‘given’ being the appropriate word because the United States and post-Soviet Russia asked for Cuban officials to participate in the meetings about the crisis—the identifier as an active agent during the crisis “but only a minor one, its role defined by U.S.-Soviet relations.”[25] Laffey and Weldes rightfully argue throughout their essay that it was American imperialism which caused Cuba to become the subaltern. In all, if the Soviets and Americans had considered Cuba more of an agent the crisis may have ended differently. 

Laffey and Weldes never analyzed the development of Khrushchev’s second, public letter; that was never the intent in their piece. Abel and Stern, writing almost fifty years apart, take the task of attempting to explain the development of Kennedy’s response letter. Abel claims that it was Robert Kennedy that first suggested to ignore Khrushchev’s public letter and only reply the first, private letter. Stern, with the luxury of having the Executive Committee transcripts, suggests that the response letter developed throughout a grueling process in which President Kennedy argued with his committee for several hours about accepting Khrushchev’s quid pro quo. The committee argued that it could severely hurt the NATO alliance and hurt the reputation of American foreign policy if the president accepted the Soviet offer. After hours of deliberation, the committee was able to talk President Kennedy off the quid pro quo ledge and insisted that they could concede only to certain demands from Khrushchev that would not hurt world politics. Abel might have been misinformed and asserted that it was Robert Kennedy to suggest such a claim, but Stern is able to unequivocally prove that it was in fact not RFK and that he took credit for it for his own political aspiration, and that it was a concerted effort by at least half of the ExComm to convince the president to go through with the Trollope ploy. 

Additionally, Khrushchev’s second letter was likely not such a shock to the Executive Committee, as was first reported. Stern makes the case that President Kennedy “had been cautiously probing the Turkish option since October 18,” nine days before Khrushchev made the public announcement.[26] Thus, Abel’s use of language such as “bombshell” to describe the reaction to Khrushchev’s public letter might have been an embellishment. Gaddis makes the point that the emplacement of American missiles in Europe gave the Soviets a leg to stand on in their deployment to Cuba. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy allowed for offensive military equipment, including the famed Jupiter missiles, to be installed very close to Soviet borders. Khrushchev likely reasoned that such acts of aggressive policy gave him the justification to ally it with Cuba to protect the island. As such, when Robert Kennedy and others drafted the response letter on October 27, they likely considered the implications of international politics, as well as the political standing of the president, which led them to insist that the Soviets must accept an agreement where the Turkish missiles would be removed months after the crisis and that Cuba would be safe from American aggression.  

On October 28, the missile crisis ended when Khrushchev accepted Kennedy’s response letter. With the nuclear war averted, both sides began to claim victory. Khrushchev was, and rightfully so, able to claim victory because he ultimately was able to extract a concession from the American president to stay out of Cuban affairs and let Castro stay in power. Kennedy was able to show his Republican rivals that a Democratic president could stand strong against Soviet aggression. Kennedy may have agreed not to invade Cuba, but he was able to claim victory because he averted a disastrous war. The crisis led to numerous treaties between the two belligerents such as the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty of 1972. Additionally, a direct phone was installed so that the American president could talk directly to the Soviet premier. To pick a side that won the crisis is a difficult task. Both powers won and lost the crisis. Both powers were seen as aggressors. The Soviets by installing aggressive weapons so close to American shores, the Americans by their continued imperialism in the Caribbean with the Bay of Pigs and continued surveillance over Cuba. 

The ultimate loser of the conflict was without a doubt Cuba. Cuba suffered the humiliation of being seen as nothing more than a location for two superpowers to exert their military muscles. While President Kennedy did agree to leave the island nation alone, the Soviets knew that if the Americans decided to invade Cuba again, there was little the Soviets could do without starting a third world war. For four decades, Cuba was left almost entirely out of the conversation about the lessons learned from the crisis. When Cuba was finally allowed to enter the conversation, they were seen as the least important of the three. As much as the United States and Soviet Union gained from the crisis, Cuba lost almost everything. It no longer had an important ally on the island which greatly decreased its military capabilities to ward off an invasion.

In conclusion, if I were to write a book on this event, I would focus almost exclusively on the Soviet-Cuban relationship before, during, and after the crisis. I would attempt to gain access to the missile sites to better understand what work the Soviet military members endured to conceal the missiles from American spy plans. I would explore the relationship between the Cuban and Soviet service members during the crisis. I would seek to empower the Cuban voice and make it front and center so that the subaltern is given a voice in a largely dominated American-Russian narrative. 

 

Bibliography

Abel, Elie. The Missile Crisis. New York: J.B. Lippincott Co, 1966.

 

Horelick, Arnold L. “The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and Behavior.” World Politics 16, no. 3 (April 1964): 363–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/2009577.

 

John Lewis Gaddis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Oxford, 1997.

 

Laffey, Mark, and Jutta Weldes. “Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis.” International Studies Quarterly 52, no. 3 (September 2008): 555–77. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2008.00515.x.

 

Stern, Sheldon M. The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.

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[1] Arnold L. Horelick, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis of Soviet Calculations and Behavior,” World Politics 16, no. 3 (April 1964): 379, https://doi.org/10.2307/2009577.

[2] Arnold L. Horelick, “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” 385-386.

[3] Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis (New York: J.B. Lippincott Co, 1966), 187.

[4] Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis, 199.

[5] Elie Abel, 199.

[6] John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford, 1997), 261.

[7] John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, 263. 

[8] John Lewis Gaddis, 263.

[9] Ibid, 266.

[10] Ibid, 270.

[11] Ibid, 278.

[12] Ibid, 279.

[13] Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, “Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis,” International Studies Quarterly 52, no. 3 (September 2008): 555–77, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2008.00515.x.

[14] Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, “Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis,” 556.

[15] Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, “Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis,” 558.

[16] Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, 572.

[17] Sheldon M Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 135.

[18] Sheldon M Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, 136.

[19] Sheldon M Stern, 138.

[20] Ibid, 146.

[21] Ibid, 146.

[22] Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis (New York: J.B. Lippincott Co, 1966), 199.

[23] John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford, 1997), 264.

[24] John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know, 265.

[25] Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, “Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis,” International Studies Quarterly 52, no. 3 (September 2008): 570, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2008.00515.x.

 

[26] Sheldon M Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 138.