Best Books on Cuba and the Cold War

For thirteen days in October 1962, the world came closer to nuclear war than it has at any point before or since. Soviet missiles were being installed in Cuba. American U-2 spy planes had photographed the launch sites. President Kennedy faced pressure from his military advisors to launch airstrikes. Soviet submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes were being tracked in the Atlantic. The men making decisions on both sides were working on fragmentary information, under enormous pressure, with very little time. The Cuban Missile Crisis is the most studied episode of the Cold War, and it keeps yielding new material as archives open and participants' accounts are reassessed. But the crisis did not emerge from nowhere. It was the product of decades of American intervention in Cuba, the specific dynamics of the Cuban Revolution, and the particular anxieties of the early 1960s nuclear standoff. These books put the crisis in context. ## Cuba Before and After Castro Cuba's relationship with the United States before 1959 was one of economic dependency and political interference. The Platt Amendment of 1901 gave the United States the legal right to intervene in Cuban affairs, and American companies controlled much of the island's sugar industry, utilities, and urban real estate. The Batista dictatorship, which Castro's July 26th Movement overthrew, had American backing. Castro's revolution initially positioned itself as nationalist rather than communist. The turn toward the Soviet Union was partly ideological and partly a response to American hostility. When the Eisenhower administration imposed economic sanctions and began planning the Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba had few options for support besides Moscow. The crisis of 1962 was the direct result of that dynamic. ## Top Books to Read ### *One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War* by Michael Dobbs Dobbs reconstructed the thirteen days of the Missile Crisis almost hour by hour, drawing on American, Soviet, and Cuban archives and on interviews with surviving participants on all three sides. What emerges is far more chaotic than the careful crisis management Kennedy's team presented to the public at the time. Soviet submarines almost launched nuclear torpedoes when American destroyers forced them to surface. An American U-2 accidentally flew into Soviet airspace during the crisis, nearly triggering an incident. Castro sent Khrushchev a letter arguing for a nuclear first strike if the Americans invaded. The resolution depended as much on luck and misunderstanding as on diplomacy. ### *Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana* by William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh This book covers the full span of American-Cuban relations from 1959 to the present, focusing on the secret diplomatic contacts that ran alongside the public hostility. LeoGrande and Kornbluh had access to declassified documents from multiple administrations and conducted extensive interviews with participants in negotiations that were, for decades, entirely off the record. The picture they present is of a relationship that could have been normalized much earlier if domestic politics on both sides had not kept getting in the way. The book is particularly good on the Kennedy and Carter periods, when serious diplomatic openings were repeatedly closed by events or political calculations. ### *The Autobiography of Fidel Castro* by Norberto Fuentes Fuentes was a Cuban writer who had close access to Castro and the inner circle for years before defecting. His book is an extended, novelistic first-person monologue written as if Castro is speaking directly, drawing on Fuentes's knowledge of Castro's actual speech patterns and recorded statements. It is not a conventional biography and should not be read as a factual account. But as an attempt to reconstruct how Castro understood himself, his revolution, and his place in world history, it is extraordinary. Fuentes captures the mixture of genuine revolutionary conviction, tactical ruthlessness, and grandiosity that made Castro such a polarizing figure. ## What the Archives Changed Much of the early scholarship on the Cuban Missile Crisis was based on American sources: White House tapes, participants' memoirs, McNamara's retrospective accounts. The picture changed significantly when Soviet and Cuban archives became partially accessible in the 1990s. Dobbs's book is the best account of what that new material revealed: a crisis that was significantly more dangerous than the American participants knew at the time, with Soviet forces in Cuba having more autonomy and more tactical nuclear weapons than American intelligence had detected. The lesson most analysts drew from this is not reassuring. The crisis was resolved not by superior crisis management but by a combination of good judgment at critical moments and considerable luck. ## Further Reading Read more Cold War history titles at [/category/cold-war](/category/cold-war).