- “The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity…Each and every government in the world has the obligation to respect the right to life of each and every nation…In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be all humanity. Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear.”
Lesson: Governments have a duty to prevent nuclear war; the only way to do that is by getting rid of all nuclear weapons.
YouTube Video Post, “Against Nuclear War: Calling for World Peace”, October 15, 2010.
————————————————————————–
- Goldberg: At a certain point it seemed logical for you to recommend that the Soviets bomb the U.S. Does what you recommended still seem logical now?”
- Castro: “After I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn’t worth it all… The Iranian capacity to inflict damage is not appreciated. Men think they can control themselves but Obama could overreact and a gradual escalation could become a nuclear war.”
Lesson: In an international crisis, try to avoid overreaction that could risk nuclear war.
Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, “Castro: ‘No One Has Been Slandered More Than the Jews’”, The Atlantic, Sept. 7, 2010.
————————————————————————–
- “We did not know the faintest thing about these rockets, not even their size, where they would have to be installed or where they were shot from, because, frankly, if we had known these things about the rockets and had been approached with the question of camouflaging it all, it would have been so easy for us to make decisions…to have taken steps to camouflage that weaponry. In a country so full of construction projects, with so many chicken farms and things everywhere, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for us to build those emplacements under the guise of something totally different and they would have never been discovered. The amazing thing was that they weren’t discovered earlier…it was a question of carelessness, lack of foresight.” (40-41)
Lesson: In conducting secretive operations, camouflage is very important. Ultimately, lack of information about the missiles led to carelessness about how they were disguised.
————————————————————————–
- “As we began to lose faith in the Soviet policy, we began to change our tactics…We realized how alone we would be in the event of a war; we also realized how stupid it was to withdraw those troops in the face of an enemy that demanded it, and that would, in future years further aggravate our perilous situation.” (60)
Lesson: In international crises, realize that sometimes your allies cannot be trusted i.e. Castro felt the Soviets abandoned Cuba.
“Fidel Castro’s Secret Speech”, January 1968, in James G. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002).
————————————————————————–