REVscene Automotive Forum - Cuban Missile Crisis at 50

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Quote:

It’s hard to attribute anything but coincidence to the fact that Cuban President Raúl Castro issued a major immigration reform on Tuesday, Oct. 16, which was the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cold War’s most harrowing moment, the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the two things are nonetheless related. Castro’s reform—eliminating the onerous exit visa requirement for Cubans who want to travel outside the communist island—is a reminder of how the missile crisis prompted both Washington and Havana to further restrict movement into and out of Cuba for the past half century. And it’s one more sign among many that each side needs to put that cold-war past behind it.

Eight months before Oct. 16, 1962—the day U.S. President John F. Kennedy was informed of the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida—the U.S. had already imposed a unilateral trade embargo on the regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. That’s largely because Fidel, who ruled Cuba from 1959 until handing the presidency to his younger brother Raúl in 2006, had aligned his Caribbean nation with the Soviet Union. Now, by letting the Soviets use bases in Cuba to position ballistic missiles that could strike deep into the U.S.—and by urging Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, according to Khrushchev’s account, to fire those missiles when Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island during the 13-day U.S.-Soviet standoff—Fidel had further stoked Washington’s wrath.

Read more: The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50: America and Cuba Still Frozen in 1962 | World | TIME.com

99.9% of RS members weren't even around when this happened...but I would assume these ICBMs were a bigger threat to BC than the possibility of a Japanese invasion on the West Coast during WWII? Seems interesting enough that a real brinkmanship of WWIII fizzled out.