The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of November

Recent studies of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis have relied heavily on remarkable declassified U.S. sources, but these have obviously not sufficed to produce a rigorous international history. Access to Soviet, Cuban, and other non-U.S. sources has been temporary, arbitrary, limited, or forbidden—prohibiting a full understanding of Soviet and Cuban actions and, thus, preventing a study of the missile crisis as a whole. Such an unfortunate situation renders this book a major contribution.

It really comprises two works. First, it is the account of early Soviet relations with Fidel Castro's Cuba, especially the difficult aftermath of the missile crisis, through the eyes of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's deputy and diplomatic troubleshooter, Anastas Mikoyan. Mikoyan did not live long enough to write his own account, so his son Sergo (his father's personal secretary during the crisis) is a substitute. Anastas had been instrumental in establishing Soviet-Cuban ties in early 1960. Thus, he was the obvious choice to smooth things over when Khrushchev agreed to settle the crisis by removing Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba. Khrushchev did so without consulting the Cuban leadership, which reacted with understandable outrage.

Following this narrative is an extensive collection of fifty primary-source documents—mostly secret telegrams and memoranda of conversations—documenting in great detail Soviet-Cuban (and also some Soviet-U.S.) negotiations in November 1962. In a renegade act of declassification, Sergo Mikoyan released most of the documents from his personal collection; they far exceed in value what they may lack in provenance.

The resulting hybrid plumbs to new depths Moscow-Havana ties before, during, and especially just after the missile crisis. Mikoyan the elder comes off as favorably as one might expect in a de facto autobiography, but there is no doubting the crucial role he played in saving Moscow's relationship with a key Cold War ally and the skill with which he played it. The narrative, while in need of maps, more thorough use of recent Western sources, and sharper editing, is laudably insightful and unsparing in its analysis of a Kremlin leadership hampered by poor communication, hastiness, and ineptitude. It stresses the defense-of-Cuba motivation behind Khrushchev's gamble. It also reveals that Soviet leaders considered handing over control of approximately one hundred tactical nuclear weapons—the existence of which was unknown in Washington, D.C.—to the Cubans. This would have constituted an unprecedented instance of proliferation, but the Kremlin decided against it largely at the urging of Anastas Mikoyan, who had learned firsthand how independent—and thus, in Moscow's eyes, untrustworthy—the Cubans were.

The documents shed light on the Soviet-Cuban relationship, including such influencing factors as Soviet stereotypes of the Cubans as “temperamental, explosive, emotional, [and] hotheaded” (p. 433). The documents also, at times, usefully illuminate unrelated topics, such as Cuban relations with the Guatemalan opposition and Ernesto “Che” Guevara's views on revolution.

For all these reasons, and in the absence of an unlikely transformation of Russian and Cuban archival policies, this book is a valuable addition to the literature.