Cuba

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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.