By Andrew
Stuttaford
Saturday, November 26, 2016
Like many millenarians, Castro welcomed the thought of
the purifying fire to come. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, decades into a
career in which had waded through blood, remained convinced that communism
still offered the promise of a radiant future to come and was a wily and
determined opponent of the US. But, unlike Castro, he had lost his taste for
the apocalypse.
Here, via
PBS, is the text of a letter Khrushchev wrote to Castro not long after the
Cuban missile crisis. The most interesting section is this (my emphasis added):
If, by giving in to popular
sentiment, we had allowed ourselves to be swept up by the more inflamed sectors
of the populace, and if we had refused to reach a reasonable agreement with the
government of the USA, war would have probably broken out, resulting in
millions of deaths. Those who survived would have blamed the leaders for not
having taken the measures that would have avoided this war of extermination…
In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to carry
out a nuclear strike against the enemy’s territory. Naturally you understand
where that would lead us. It would not be a simple strike, but the start of a
thermonuclear world war.
Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I find
your proposal to be wrong, even though I understand your reasons.
We have lived through a very grave
moment, a global thermonuclear war could have broken out. Of course the United
States would have suffered enormous losses, but the Soviet Union and the whole
socialist bloc would have also suffered greatly. It is even difficult to say
how things would have ended for the Cuban people. First of all, Cuba would have burned in the fires of war. Without a
doubt the Cuban people would have fought courageously but, also without a
doubt, the Cuban people would have perished heroically. We struggle against
imperialism, not in order to die, but to draw on all of our potential, to lose
as little as possible, and later to win more, so as to be a victor and make
communism triumph.
Castro, the internationalist, mourned by a pope,
presidents and the leadership of an ‘ever closer Europe’, wanted to start a
nuclear war.
Castro, the patriot, was willing to consign his own
country to the flames. Writing later, Castro’s accomplice, Guevara, put it like
this (again, my
emphasis added):
Here is the electrifying example of a people prepared to suffer nuclear
immolation so that its ashes may serve as a foundation for new societies.
When an agreement was reached by which the atomic missiles were removed,
without asking our people, we were not relieved or thankful…
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