Angel Castillo Jr., a former reporter and editor for the New York Times and The Miami Herald, practices employment law in Miami. He can be reached at acastillo@floridavoices.com.
While Cuba’s ailing Communist Comandante Fidel Castro, 86, waits for death in Havana and his trip to hell, it is a good time to remember how he tried – and thankfully failed – to push the world into a nuclear holocaust 50 years ago.
Before dawn on “Black Saturday,” Oct. 27, 1962, the then 36-year-old Cuban dictator transmitted an encrypted “Armageddon” letter to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow.
Castro and Khrushchev had conspired to secretly install Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba that could hit Washington, D.C. However, U.S. spy planes had discovered them on Oct. 15, and an American naval blockade of Cuba had begun on Oct. 22.
Castro was convinced that a much bigger version of the prior year’s Bay of Pigs attack was coming in “24-72 hours”. In his letter he urged Khrushchev, then 68, to launch a nuclear attack against the United States if such an invasion took place.
“If they actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba,” Castro wrote, “that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution would be … there is no other.”
Later the same day, anti-aircraft batteries began firing on low-flying American reconnaissance planes over Cuba. And in the afternoon, Soviet commanders shot down a U-2 reconnaissance plane originating at McCoy Air Force Base in Orlando. The pilot, Air Force Maj. Rudolf Anderson Jr., 35, of Greenville, S.C., was killed.
However, on the day after Castro sent his doomsday letter, Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy cut a deal – leaving the belligerent Castro out of the loop – peacefully resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Soviets agreed to remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba, and Kennedy promised that the U.S. would not invade Cuba again. He also agreed to remove American nuclear missiles from Turkey.
At a University of Miami seminar on Oct. 20 about the missile crisis, the panelists tried to explain Castro’s “nuke ’em” letter. Cuban affairs specialist Brian Latell said Castro was a sociopath. Pedro Roig, former director of TV and Radio Marti, called him a psychopath. And a Hallandale psychiatrist, Dr. Maximo Monterrey, said his diagnosis was that Castro was “paranoid with latent homosexual tendencies”.
There is another (admittedly highly speculative) theory of why Castro wanted to nuke the United States.
Castro’s lifelong anti-American antagonism may have arisen in part as a result of a letter that Castro, then 14, wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Nov. 6, 1940. In the letter, handwritten in fractured English, Castro begged the president to send him a $10 bill. “I have not seen a ten dollars bill green American and I would like to have one of them,” Castro implored.
A form response letter was sent to Castro from the U.S. Embassy in Havana, but no money.
Fifty years after Black Saturday, one can only wonder if the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been averted if FDR had sent the teenaged Castro a $10 bill.
Angel Castillo Jr., a former reporter and editor for the New York Times and The Miami Herald, practices employment law in Miami. He can be reached at acastillo@floridavoices.com.
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