Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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P.O.W. Offer. Viet Nam is not the only place where the elastic nature of unwritten diplomatic "understandings" has been demonstrated. Washington and Moscow reached such an understanding over Cuba after the 1962 missile crisis: no more nuclear weapons in Cuba, no U.S. invasion of the island (see THE WORLD). The flexible nature of the agreement was apparent at the Nixon press conference when he said that a Russian submarine base at Cienfuegos, where nuclear subs presumably could be serviced, does not constitute a threat to the U.S. One of the shorter-lived understandings led to the Middle East cease-fire...
Alarming News. Khrushchev says that in the spring of 1962, at a meeting in the Kremlin, he spoke about how Cuba's Fidel Castro had resisted the Bay of Pigs landing only a year earlier. "I said that it would be foolish to expect the inevitable second invasion to be as badly planned and executed as the first. I warned that Fidel would crushed and said we were the only ones who could prevent such a disaster from occurring." Khrushchev found another justification: "The Americans had surrounded our own country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons...
Khrushchev began rushing intermediate-range nuclear missiles, launching equipment and Ilyushin-28 bombers to Cuba. President Kennedy's dramatic response was to order a naval blockade of Cuba and to warn that the U.S. would take "whatever means may be necessary" to remove the missiles. Khrushchev grew alarmed. Seeking "to take the heat off the situation," he suggested to other members of his government: "Comrades, let's go to the Bolshoi Theater this evening. Our own people as well as foreign eyes will notice, and perhaps it will calm them down." After he and Kennedy had begun exchanging...
Dignified Way Out. The break in the crisis, says Khrushchev, came with a secret visit by Robert Kennedy to Soviet Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin. Khrushchev says that Kennedy told Dobrynin: "We are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power." That quote is clearly suspect, suggesting that Khrushchev himself magnanimously found what he describes as "a dignified way out" of the crisis; most Western accounts give that credit to the Kennedys. In any case, Khrushchev continues...
...Grande-set in motion a series of events that shocked the world. Acting with unflinching determination, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau rejected the terrorists' initial extravagant demands for Cross' release: $500,000 in gold bullion, plus transport and safe conduct for 23 jailed F.L.Q. thugs to Cuba or Algeria. After the ransom was denied, another group of kidnapers then abducted Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte, prompting Trudeau to crack down really hard. Under a little-used World War I security measure, the Prime Minister invoked emergency police powers -something that had never been done in peacetime in tolerant, democratic...