Cuba

Assembled from 10 blocks · 1 evidence · 8 related

1. Story
2. The largest island of the Caribbean, roughly a hundred and fifty kilometres from Florida, and after the revolution of 1959 the one place where the confrontation arrived within short-range missile distance of the American mainland. Its geography is the whole of its strategic significance here: medium-range missiles based on Cuba could reach a large part of the continental United States with flight times of minutes rather than the half hour of an intercontinental trajectory, which meant they threatened American bomber bases and command centres before those could react. That was the Soviet calculation in 1962, and it is a mirror image of what the United States had already done by basing intermediate-range Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy, within similar reach of Soviet territory. The settlement of the crisis included an American undertaking not to invade the island, and Cuba remained a Soviet client, and a supplier of expeditionary forces in African conflicts, until the Soviet subsidy ended around 1991.
3. Knowledge
4. Cuba
5. Connections
6. The San Cristóbal medium-range missile sites
7. A U-2 photographs missile construction in western Cuba
8. The Cuban missile crisis
9. Evidence
10. Named as the principal declassified-document collection behind this pack's account of the crisis, the B-59 submarine incident and the later disclosures about tactical warheads on the island. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted — nsarchive.gwu.edu is blocked by the environment's egress proxy. Everything this pack says about the crisis is from standing knowledge of the published historiography, and the degree of documentary support for the B-59 account in particular is not established here.