Cuba
Caribbean island state, theater of the 1962 missile crisis
Also known as: Cuba, Cuban
Caribbean island state, theater of the 1962 missile crisis and a recurring Cold War set piece in T&H (T&H 15).
Quigley's Framing
Cuba enters T&H principally as the site of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the October 1962 missile crisis. Quigley's account is unusual in arguing that the public American version — Kennedy's resolute brinksmanship forcing Khrushchev to back down — understates the concessions the United States made on the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and on a no-invasion pledge. The crisis is treated as the moment at which both sides finally took the measure of nuclear escalation and the subsequent decade of détente became possible.
Strategic Role
Beyond the missile crisis, Cuba functions in T&H as a marker of broader U.S. Latin American policy: the long history of American interventions from the 1898 war through the Platt Amendment era, the 1959 Castro revolution, the failed Bay of Pigs, and the post-1962 Soviet alignment. The island's strategic role — ninety miles off the Florida coast, planted with a hostile regime hosting Soviet military assistance — made it the most acute single instance of the Monroe Doctrine being overturned in practice.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 15 Quigley
Cuba, ninety miles off the Florida coast, became the most acute instance of the Monroe Doctrine being overturned in practice.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1359 Quigley
The Cuban missile crisis was the moment at which both sides finally took the measure of nuclear escalation.