missiles to deliver them. When Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan and Kennedy met at Nassau in
the Bahamas in December 1962, the Anglo-
American special relationship was sufficiently
intact for the US president, who held the avun-
cular Macmillan in high regard, to promise to
provide the Polaris missile for British submarines.
The Soviet Union and the US, with Britain as a
junior partner, thus tried to provide a lead, per-
forming a policeman’s role, in preventing the
spread of nuclear weapons, though at the same
time they themselves were updating and increas-
ing their own arsenals. The efforts to limit the
spread of nuclear weapons in the world were
doomed to failure.
The 1960s and 1970s ushered in an unprece-
dented nuclear-arms race between the Soviet
Union and the US. They trusted each other no
more than before, despite their shared interest
in making the world a less dangerous place by
not placing control of nuclear weapons in the
hands of other states. This did not prevent
the Kremlin from stationing nuclear warheads
and missiles under Soviet control in Poland and
East Germany, any more than it prevented the
US and Britain from doing the same in West
Germany and Italy. The US–Soviet detente of the
1960s and 1970s coincided not only with huge
military expenditure but also with acute rivalry in
the Third World.
The most uncomfortable truth learnt from the
Cuban missile crisis was that the decision to inflict
or not to inflict radiation poisoning on much of
the world lay in the hands of potentially unpre-
dictable leaders in Moscow and Washington. In
both the democratic and the communist states,
the crucial decision-making depended on a
handful of men, on their judgement, stability and
good sense as they operated behind closed doors.
The US president informed the Western allies,
even conferred with them, but in the end he made
his own decision. The Kremlin is unlikely even to
have consulted allies. It was comforting, however,
that the West was evidently not dealing with fanat-
ics of Hitler’s kind. For the Kremlin leadership
the mercurial temperament of Khrushchev posed
too great a danger, and the risks he took during
the missile crisis contributed to his fall in 1964.
Turning to US policy in the hemisphere, its
efforts to line up all Latin America against Cuba
after the ‘Bay of Pigs’ fiasco was not an unquali-
fied success. Cuba was expelled from the
Organisation of American States in February
1962, but the countries of Latin America refused
to follow the US in imposing a general trade
embargo. Nor was the US able to stop trade
between its NATO allies and Cuba. Canada, for
example, became an important exporter to, and
importer from, Cuba. The loss of the US market
for Cuba’s sugar, its main export earner, threat-
ened enormous dislocation until the Soviet Union
filled the breach. Up to the 1990s, Castro became
dependent on Soviet largesse to bolster Cuba’s
failing economy as well as on ill-advised loans
from Western banks, which are unlikely to get
their money back. Sabotage efforts directed from
the US against vital Cuban targets, such as sugar
mills, electric power stations and communications
centres, continued until President Johnson ended
them in April 1964. American policies deeply
injured Cuba, but the objective of getting rid of
Castro and his communist regime, at first through
military and economic means and later by eco-
nomic and diplomatic isolation, demonstrably
failed. For the first time since 1898, Cuba’s pow-
erful neighbour no longer controlled the island’s
destiny.
Cuban national pride is one reason why Castro
had survived for half a century. The redistribution
of income in favour of the poor and from the
cities to the agricultural regions gained him solid
support among the peasantry. Better health care
and education were genuine achievements of the
revolution. The poor, during the early years,
became ardent adherents of the revolution. But
Cuba has suffered from the inefficiencies of its
socialist policies and command economy. With
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the future for
the people of Cuba looked grim.
The American trade embargo was designed to
bring about Castro’s fall and the end of the com-
munist regime after intervention by force was
abandoned after the missile crisis. Castro’s
authoritarian rule and human rights abuses have
prevented the regime’s full acceptance by the
West. By 2005 Castro had become the longest
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