An essay in universal history

25. NUCLEAR WAR AND THE CUBAN CRISIS

By the late 1950s, not only the United States (in 1952), but also the Soviet Union (in 1953) and Britain (1957) had acquired, not only the atomic bomb, but also the far more powerful thermonuclear weapons capable of inflicting hitherto unimaginable destruction and death. “The race” writes David Reynolds, “was then to upgrade their ‘delivery systems’ from the era of air power into the missile age. This time the Soviets beat the Americans. Their launch of a man-made satellite, Sputnik, in November 1957 was both a technological humiliation for the USA and also a sign that the USSR had a sufficiently powerful rocket to launch a nuclear missile all the way to America. Eisenhower’s administration hastily accelerated its own missile programme and implemented a major scheme of civil defence.”³¹²

The two superpowers had adopted a system of deterrence called “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD). As Kevin Ruane writes, Churchill also embraced this mad system. By the time he retired as prime minister in April, 1955, “he had concluded that nuclear arms, especially the genocidal H-bomb, were a potentially stabilizing element in world affairs…
“The ‘annihilating character of these agencies may bring an utterly unforeseeable security to mankind,’ he predicted. If the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers could be balanced, then by a ‘sublime irony… safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation’.”³¹³
“The nuclear age,” writes Henry Kissinger, “posed the dilemma of how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that were being pursued. Prospects for any kind of international order – indeed, for human survival – now urgently required the amelioration, if not elimination, of major-power conflict. A theoretical limit was sought – short of the point of either superpower using the entirety of its military capabilities.
“Strategic stability was defined as a balance in which neither side would use its weapons of mass destruction because the adversary was always able to inflict an unacceptable level of destruction in retaliation. In a series of seminars at Harvard, Caltech, MIT, and the Rand Corporation among others in the 1950s and 1960s, a doctrine of ‘limited use’ explored confining nuclear weapons to the battlefield or to military targets. All such theoretical efforts failed; whatever limits were imagined, once the threshold to nuclear warfare was crossed, modern technology overrode observable limits and always enabled the adversary to escalate. Ultimately, strategists on both sides coalesced, at least tacitly, on the concept of a mutually assured destruction as the mechanism of nuclear peace. Based on a premise that both sides possessed a nuclear arsenal capable of surviving an initial assault, the objective was to counterbalance threats sufficiently terrifying that neither side would conceive of actually invoking them.
“By the end of the 1960s, the prevailing strategic doctrine of each superpower relied on the ability to inflict an ‘unacceptable’ level of damage on the presumed adversary. What the adversary would consider unacceptable was, of course, unknowable; nor was this judgement communicated…
“Many efforts were undertaken to avoid the dilemma of possessing a huge arsenal that could not be used and whose use could not even plausibly be threatened. Complicated war scenarios were devised. But neither side, to the best of my knowledge – and for some of this period I was in a position to know – ever approached the point of actually using nuclear weapons in a specific crisis between the two superpowers. Except for the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when a Soviet combat division was initially authorized to use its nuclear weapons to defend itself, neither side approached their use, either against each other or in wars against non-nuclear third countries…”³¹⁴
*
That the crisis which nearly led to MAD should have taken place in Cuba was a function both of that country’s geographical closeness to the United States and of its recent history, alternating between rightist and leftist governments. Protopresbyter James Thornton writes: “In 1933, a leftist revolutionary uprising overthrew the administration of President Gerardo Machado and put Ramón Grau San Martín in power as the head of what came to be called the ‘One Hundred Days Government.’ Grau himself was a moderate reformer but was surrounded by radicals in his administration. That government was overthrown in January 1934 by Army Chief of Staff Colonel Fulgencio Batista, who installed a series of provisional governments throughout the remainder of the decade.

“In the election of 1940, which was reportedly open and fair, Batista won the presidency. He was succeeded in office by Grau, who was elected in 1944, and Carlos Prío Socarrás, elected in 1948. Prío’s period in office was marred by a substantial increase in government corruption and political violence. Consequently, in March 1952, Batista, in concert with leaders of the military and police, seized power to prevent the country from sinking into complete chaos. The outcome of free elections in 1953, which made Batista legally the president, seemed to signal the approval of most Cubans of the coup of the previous year, since the country had grown impatient with the seemingly endless disorder.

“About Batista’s administration one can say both bad things and good. On the bad side, corruption was not eliminated and organized crime, which had gained a considerable toehold in Cuba immediately after the Second World War, continued to thrive. On the good side, the nation enjoyed tremendous prosperity in the 1950s. Wages in Cuba were the eighth highest in the world. The country was blessed by a large and growing middle class, which constituted approximately one-third of the population. Social mobility (the ability of members of one class in the social strata to rise to higher levels) became a genuine reality. Of the working class, more than 20 percent were classified as skilled. During the Batista years, Cuba enjoyed the third-highest per-capita income in Latin America and possessed an excellent network of highways and railroads, along with many modern ports. Cubans had the highest per-capita consumption in Latin America of meat, vegetables, cereals, automobiles, telephones, and radios, and was fifth highest in the number of television sets in the world.

“Cuba’s healthcare system was outstanding, with one of the highest numbers of medical doctors per capita in the world, the third-lowest adult mortality rate in the world, and the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America. Cuba during the 1950s spent more on education than any other Latin American country and had the fourth-highest literacy rate in Latin America.

“President Batista built part of his following through an alliance with organized labor. As a result, workers by law worked an eight-hour day, 44 hours per week. They received a month’s paid vacation, plus four additional paid holidays per year. They were also entitled to nine days of sick leave with pay per year. In short, while things were not perfect in all of the areas just noted, they were nevertheless remarkably advanced and were gradually improving. Yet, much work remained to be done in rural regions, where poverty and the lack of a complete modern infrastructure remained a problem…

“In July 1953, a little-known revolutionary named Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl, and a small group of rebels attacked a military barracks in the southeast of the country hoping to spark a revolution, but were defeated. The Castro brothers were captured and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Unfortunately for Cuba and its people, President Batista declared a general amnesty in 1955, which set the Castros free. The two then traveled to Mexico where they, in conjunction with Argentinian Marxist terrorist Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, organized a revolutionary group known as the ‘26th of July Movement,’ the aim of which was to overthrow the Cuban government and seize power. In December 1956, the group of some 82 fighters boarded a yacht and sailed to Cuba, where they were confronted by elements of Batista’s armed forces. In the ensuing clash, most of the insurgents were either killed or captured. However, the Castro brothers, Guevara, and a small group of about 12 others escaped and fled into the Sierra Maestra mountains, where they launched the beginnings of the revolution that would bring Fidel Castro to power.

“Castro portrayed himself at that time as a devotee of democratic rule, contrasting that with Batista’s non-democratic authoritarianism, and promised American-style freedoms and an end to dictatorship. Some members of his 26th of July Movement, and even a few members of the leadership corps of that organization, were actually anti-communists, misled by Castro as to the true nature of his ultimate goals. The propaganda about a return to a representative and just government was widely believed, particularly among the poorer classes, students, and some intellectuals. Consequently, Castro’s movement grew as people hoped for an end to corruption, political upheaval, and revolutionary violence. Those people were soon to be sorely disappointed.

“During the late 1950s, after Castro had begun his revolutionary activities in the mountains of southeastern Cuba and up until Castro grabbed the reins of power, two men served as U.S. ambassadors to Cuba: Arthur Gardner, who served from 1953 to 1957, and Earl T. Smith, who served from 1957 to 1959. In testimony before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Ambassador Gardner declared on August 27, 1960 that ‘U.S. Government agencies and the U.S. press played a major role in bringing Castro to power.’ He also testified that Castro was receiving illegal arms shipments from the United States, about which our government was aware, while, at the same time, the U.S. government halted arms sales to Batista, even halting shipments of arms for which the Cuban government had already paid. Senator Thomas J. Dodd asked if Gardner believed that the U.S. State Department ‘was anxious to replace Batista with Castro,’ to which he answered, ‘I think they were.’

“Ambassador Earl T. Smith testified before the same committee on August 30, 1960. He declared in his testimony that, ‘Without the United States, Castro would not be in power today.’ Smith wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in September 1979 in connection with the communist revolution in Nicaragua that put the Sandinista regime in power. Smith wished to illustrate how forces within the U.S. government brought both ultra-leftist governments to power.  He wrote: ‘After a few months as chief of mission [that is, as Ambassador to Cuba], it became obvious to me that the Castro-led 26th of July movement embraced every element of radical political thought and terrorist inclination in Cuba. The State Department consistently intervened … to bring about the downfall of President Fulgencio Batista, thereby making it possible for Fidel Castro to take over the Government of Cuba. The final coup in favor of Castro came on Dec. 17, 1958. On that date, in accordance with my instructions from the State Department, I personally conveyed to President Batista that the Department of State would view with skepticism any plan on his part, or any intention on his part, to remain in Cuba indefinitely. I had dealt him a mortal blow. He said in substance: “You have intervened in behalf of the Castros, but I know it is not your doing and that you are only following out your instructions.” Fourteen days later, on Jan. 1, 1959, the Government of Cuba fell.’
“In Ambassador Smith’s book, The Fourth Floor, he lists the many actions by the United States that led to the fall of the Batista government. Among these were suspending arms sales, halting the sale of replacement parts for military equipment, persuading other governments not to sell arms to Batista, and public statements that assisted Castro and sabotaged Batista. These actions and many others, he wrote, ‘had a devastating psychological effect upon those supporting the [pro-American, anti-Communist] government of Cuba.’
“Left-leaning journalists were as ubiquitous in the 1950s as they are today. One of these, New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews, interviewed Castro in February 1957, reporting that Castro ‘has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections.’ Matthews went on to say that Castro was not only not a communist, but was definitely an anti-communist. That story, and other similar stories, created a myth that Fidel Castro was actually a friend of the United States and its way of life, that he was the ‘George Washington of Cuba’ (as television entertainer and columnist Ed Sullivan called him), and that what he fought for was a program of mild agrarian reform, an end to corruption, and constitutional representative government. The myth also claimed that after his victory in January 1959, he was driven into the arms of the USSR by the uncooperative and even hostile attitude of the United States. Curiously, that myth is still repeated to this day. However, the truth about Castro is as far from that myth as possible, as we shall now see.

“Cuba officially established diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union in 1943, during the Second World War. Among the functionaries of the Soviet staff sent to Cuba was one Gumar W. Bashirov, an official of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police (later known as the KGB). Bashirov’s job was to recruit a group of Cuban youths who, over time, could be used to subvert Cuban society and thereby advance the cause of world communism. Among those almost immediately recruited was the young Fidel Castro.

“Castro himself admitted in an interview with leftist journalist Saul Landau that he had become a Marxist when, as a student, he first read the Communist Manifesto. For that reason he willingly became a Soviet agent in 1943, when he was only 17 years of age. After the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe in 1944-45, some of Bashirov’s young recruits were sent to Czechoslovakia for training. But the Soviets forbade Castro himself from joining the Communist Party or any communist front organizations so that he would remain untainted by such associations. Instead, they placed him in reserve, saving him for future eventualities. We see, therefore, that Fidel Castro was a Communist and a Soviet agent long before he took power in 1959.”³¹⁵
In April, 1961 President John F. Kennedy made a bungled attempt to topple Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion. This was followed by farcical attempts to assassinate Castro. Encouraged by the President’s mistakes, and also by false intelligence reports that the Pentagon was planning to initiate a war with the Soviet Union “as soon as possible”, Khruschev decided in May, 1962 to construct nuclear missile bases in Cuba.
The crisis came to a head at the end of October, when Khruschev backed down and accepted Kennedy’s terms: Cuban territorial integrity in exchange for the withdrawal of “all Soviet offensive arms” from Cuba.³¹⁶
The Cuban missile crisis very nearly brought the world to nuclear war and MAD. As American secretary of state Dean Rusk put it, the two superpowers had been “eyeball to eyeball” and in the end it was the Soviets who “blinked”.³¹⁷ Some have attributed its aversion to Kennedy’s coolness, others – to a principled refusal of a Soviet submarine officer to follow orders.³¹⁸
However, there is another more probable cause of the world’s salvation: the mercy of God in response to the intercession of His saints on earth – specifically, one of the great confessors of the Catacomb Church, Bishop Michael (Yershov) of Kazan. Stories about him began to seep out to the West towards the end of his life and after his death in 1974. But it was not until a full (739-page) biography of him appeared recently that his full stature and importance became apparent.
Michael Vasilyevich Yershov was born in 1911 into a poor family. His father became a Bolshevik and beat his son, but was later converted by him and repented. In 1931, Michael was imprisoned for the first time for his rejection of the Sovietized Moscow Patriarchate. Apart from a short period in the early 1940s, he remained in the camps for the rest of his life, being transported from one end of the GULAG to the other and dying, still in prison, on June 4, 1974. He presented an astounding image of patience and suffering that converted many to the Faith. He was a wonderworker and had the gifts of healing and prophecy. But perhaps his most astounding miracle was worked in the Mordovian camps together with his fellow inmate and secret bishop, Basil Vasilyevich Kalinin.
“It was August, 1962. The Cuban crisis! The attention of the world was glued to it, and it affected even the special section hidden in the Mordovian forests. ‘It has to be…! Khruschev has penetrated into the bosom of the Americans!’ That was how the zeks [criminal inmates] interpreted it. People living beyond the barbed wire admitted the possibility that in time of war the local authorities would annihilate them, as the most dangerous politicals, first of all.”
“At the special section the zeks insisted that Moscow had issued an order that in time of war the politicals and recidivists would be annihilated first of all. The Cuban crisis was soon resolved, and our camp calmed down. Many years later I heard that the fears of the zeks in 1962 had not been without foundation. They had really been threatened with annihilation at that time.” “In 1964, soon after the fall of Khruschev, a colonel from the Georgian KGB came to our camp. And he said, among other things: ‘Khruschev adopted the policy of the complete physical annihilation of the politicals, and first of all the recidivists. During the Cuban crisis everything was prepared for your shooting – even a pit was dug’.” [Bishop] Basil Vasilyevich Kalinin remembered that the holy hierarch [Michael] once unexpectedly aroused him from sleep with the words: “Six minutes are remaining. Get up, Basil, and pray! The world is in danger!” And then he learned that this was the critical moment in the Cuban crisis…³¹⁹
Truly, “the effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5.16). For “when Moses prayed to the Lord, the fire was quenched” (Numbers 11.2), and when Elijah prayed to the Lord the heavens were closed and again opened (James 5.17). And when the two True Orthodox bishops Michael and Basil prayed to the Lord, the world was saved from nuclear holocaust…
“Let the world mock us,” wrote Bishop Michael, “but we, poor people, must give all our strength and desire in prayer to God”. “We must strictly watch over ourselves, that we do not fall under the condemnation and wrath of God. We must pour out the balsam of our strength and purity of heart whatever happens, our simple, true and holy prayer to God, which is bound by nothing except simplicity and belief in our eternal inheritance. For the Lord looks on the righteous and on their holy appeals, so that the prayer offered may be the earnest of our strength and the balsam of purification, by which the world might be preserved and the catastrophe which cannot even be expressed in words – God forbid! – might be averted.”
“You yourselves know that a city is preserved if a righteous man is praying in it. Once the righteous man has left the city, the elements rule in the city. And so, dear ones, remember this one thing, that now is not that day on which the universe was created, and everything was brought into being, but now is the day on which danger menaces the creation…”³²⁰
Besides this pure, simple, burning prayer of a righteous man, Bishop Michael insisted on the pure confession of the True Orthodox Faith. “Between the Church of the Tikhonite orientation [the True Orthodox Church] and the legal church [the Moscow Patriarchate] there is the following difference. The Church of the Tikhonite orientation zealously fulfils all the laws and rules that are prescribed by the Holy Fathers, while the legal church tolerates atheism, does not struggle against iniquity, but is reconciled with it. I recognize the One Apostolic Church. The legal church recognizes Lenin and Stalin, and serves Soviet power and carries out the orders of the atheist antichrists.”³²¹
“Do not believe any sects: this is a cunning contemporary politics that has come out from the West. There are even some that are like the Orthodox faith. But you, my brothers and dear ones, must not go anywhere – may the Lord keep you! There are also many enemies of our Orthodox Christian faith, we have many enemies. The first is Catholicism, our most cunning and evil enemy, and the Lutherans, and all the sects, which came out of America and now, like dirt, have spread through the whole earth. It is difficult for us poor people now, we have no defence from men, everyone wants to offend us. But we are faithful. We are the most true patriots of our Mother, the Holy Orthodox Christian Eastern Apostolic Church. We are patriots of Holy Rus’ and we know the tricks of all kinds of people, and we will not deviate in any direction: for Holy Rus’ is sanctified by the sufferings of her own people. Every foot is creeping into Russia and wanting to defile her. No, Russia will preserve all the holy mysteries, even if through small, simple people, but she will show the whole world light, and strength, and greatness. Dear ones, the Orthodox Church will conquer the whole universe. Fear not, my dear ones, the Lord will conquer evil. Amen.”³²²
Bishop Michael was a simple, uneducated man. But he attained the spiritual heights. “In my lifetime I have not studied the sciences, but I have come to know the keys of the universe and have reached the depths of the abyss. It is hard and difficult without the Supreme Creator. With the Creator and His Life-giving Spirit and the righteousness of Christ I have passed through the arena of an indescribable life…”³²³
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After the Cuban crisis, the Cuban revolution developed on conventional Soviet lines. Thus “during the repressions of the 1960s”, write Pascal Fontaine, Yves Santamaria and Sylvain Boulouque, “between 7,000 and 10,000 people were killed and 30,000 people imprisoned for political reasons.”³²⁴ Conditions in the prisons were appalling, torture was normal. Much of the economy was run on slave labour provided by prisoners.
Cuba also has its boatpeople on the Vietnameses model, called balseros. Although about one third of balseros have died at sea, “over thirty years, approximately 100,000 have attempted the journey. The result of this exodus is that out of 11 million inhabitants, 2 million no live in exile. Exile has scattered many families among Havana, Miami, Spain, and Puerto Rico.”³²⁵ For it is an inexorable law of all communist states, that very large numbers of those who have tasted of their delights try to flee from them if they can, becoming the most fervent anti-communists in the states that give them refuge…