The World

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.’

Within days, the Castros were informed. ‘The best way to safeguard Cuba,’ replied Fidel. ‘We’re willing to accept all the missiles.’ Khrushchev told his comrades he was stuffing ‘a hedgehog’ down Uncle Sam’s pants. In July as plans were made, Raul Castro and Che Guevara visited Moscow, asking, ‘What precautions have you taken in case the operation is discovered?’