The featured speaker at the New York event was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., former advisor to President John F. Kennedy. He and the other panelists put forward the official U.S. government version--presented from a liberal perspective--of the October 1962 events in which Washington brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

As the speakers portrayed it, Kennedy saved the world from disaster, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was a sensible adversary, and the Cuban people were simply not part of the picture.

Schlesinger, a prominent U.S. historian, was a special assistant to Kennedy in 1962 and was intimately involved in the White House’s propaganda efforts at the time. He was joined on the platform by Wayne Smith, who headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana under the Carter administration.

Also speaking was Nina Khrushcheva, a professor at the New School, and Celestine Bohlen, a former New York Times correspondent who chaired the meeting. Publicity for the event had listed Carlos Alzugaray, deputy director of Cuba’s Institute for Higher International Studies, as a speaker, but U.S. officials denied him a visa, according to the event’s organizers.

October 1962 was "the most dangerous moment in human history. It was the only time two contending powers had the capacity to blow up the world," Schlesinger began. "We were fortunate to have leaders as concerned as Kennedy and Khrushchev who avoided a nuclear war."

The former Kennedy advisor noted that the events leading up to the "missile" crisis were preceded by the U.S.-organized attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. This mercenary invasion "was a misguided effort inherited from [former president Dwight] Eisenhower," Schlesinger asserted, adding that "Kennedy would never have conceived something like that."

He mentioned Washington’s secret campaign of counterrevolutionary terror and destabilization from late 1961 through 1962, code-named Operation Mongoose, as a program of sabotage. In fact, the operation was much broader in scope, including detailed scenarios of pretexts that could lead to a direct U.S. invasion of Cuba.

Schlesinger acknowledged that in signing a mutual defense agreement with the Soviet Union in 1962, the Cuban leadership had argued for making the pact--including the deployment of Soviet missiles on the island--public, in contrast with the Soviet officials’ effort to keep it secret.

Schlesinger concluded his presentation by comparing discussions among U.S. officials in October 1962 to the current tactical differences among Democratic and Republican politicians over Washington’s war moves in the Middle East. "Everyone agreed that the missiles had to be gotten out" of Cuba, Schlesinger said. While some officials simply wanted to get the Soviet missiles moved, "others campaigned for preemptive war. Fortunately they did not prevail."

The same day as the CUNY forum, Schlesinger appeared as one of the signers of a full-page ad in the New York Times, sponsored by the liberal group Common Cause, opposing a Congressional resolution that, it explained, would give U.S. president George Bush "a blank check to make war on Iraq." The ad argued instead that "we must encourage the United Nations to make every effort to carry out effective inspections to ascertain the danger from Iraqi weapons" before launching a full-scale war against Iraq.

Smith and Khrushcheva spoke in the same vein as Schlesinger. "Thank God Khrushchev accepted Kennedy’s proposal that the Soviets withdraw the missiles and the U.S. end its naval blockade against Cuba," Smith said.

Khrushcheva cited approvingly a speech by Sen. Edward Kennedy on Iraq the previous week in which he cited President Kennedy’s actions in October 1962 as an example of restraint in contrast to those who sought a "preemptive" attack.  
 
‘About the revolution, not missiles’
During the question period, Schlesinger and Smith both expressed their view that Washington’s four-decade-long economic embargo against Cuba does not advance its interests today. Criticizing the Bush administration’s Cuba policy, Schlesinger argued, "The embargo protects Castro and enables him to play the nationalist card." It would be better, he stated, to lift the embargo and "drown him with American tourists."

Speaking from the floor, Martín Koppel, who is the Socialist Workers candidate for governor of New York, expressed a different view. The October 1962 crisis, he said, "was not primarily about missiles but about the Cuban Revolution, which the U.S. government was determined to overthrow because of the example it set for workers and farmers around the world, including in the United States." He encouraged those attending the meeting to read the newly published Pathfinder book October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba by Tomás Diez Acosta. This book, Koppel said, details how the Kennedy administration began planning for a direct U.S. invasion of Cuba following Washington’s defeat at the Bay of Pigs, and describes the mobilization and determination of the Cuban people to defend themselves that stayed the U.S. rulers’ hand.

"There were no plans to invade Cuba," said Smith in response. "There were no troop movements to the south" or other evidence of such plans, he added. Schlesinger said, "If we had wanted to invade, we would have smashed Cuba," alleging that it was thanks to Kennedy that an invasion did not take place.

Disputing that view, Koppel had pointed out that on Oct. 26, 1962, Kennedy was informed by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that a U.S. invasion of Cuba would cost more than 18,000 U.S. casualties in the first 10 days, more than the U.S. casualties in the first five years of the Vietnam war--a political price Washington was not willing to pay.

Another member of the audience pointed to a Pentagon memo dated September 25 of that year laying out contingency plans to carry out an invasion of Cuba on as little as two days’ notice.

Another participant in the meeting questioned the seriousness of Kennedy’s professed attempts to make peace with the Cuban government after the "missile" crisis, given the numerous continued U.S. attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader.

Schlesinger replied that the assassination attempts all issued from the CIA, and that Kennedy never knew what was happening. He did not mention that the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was a regular participant in meetings of top officials that discussed Washington’s plans to try to overthrow the Cuban Revolution.

The majority of the audience appeared to be in agreement with the speakers. A number of people, however, stopped by a literature table outside the meeting that was staffed by supporters of the Socialist Workers campaign. They purchased $120 worth of books, including three copies of October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba and several other titles on the Cuban Revolution.
 
 
Related articles:
‘U.S. has no right to demand inspections’
Castro: ‘Anyone who tries to inspect Cuba had better arrive in full combat gear’  
 
 
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