The Pros And Cons Of The Cuban Crisis

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On the final few days of the crisis, Cuba didn’t feel like they were going to have a say in what was going to happen in the end. Castro did not like being abandoned by the Soviet Union because they wanted to save their own interests. According to Belkin and Blight (1991), on the “final weekend of the crisis a communication from Castro warning of an American attack and proposing that the Soviets launch their missiles preemptively” because they didn’t feel like the compromise would be fulfilled on the United States side (734). Given this information the Soviet Union and the United States knew that the actions of both of them would have an effect on the other and they needed to come to a middle ground fast. As Belkin and Blight (1991) put it “the …show more content…
The thirteen days it took to come to an agreement about the missiles in Cuba could have went in many different directions then it did. Given all the information presented, it further establishes that this small part of the Cold War really did threaten the security of the American people, that it was John F. Kennedy’s greatest success, and that it was on the brink of going from a cold war to a hot war in a matter of days. With this crisis under our belts, we can use the pros and cons of the crisis as a point in future crisis’s that we will come up in the years to come. Many foreign policies that we have now were constructed from the lessons learned by the Cuban Missile Crisis. This crisis does bring about many questions that could have made the crisis turn into war at any point. If Cuba had more control could they have enacted a nuclear war that would have had dire consequences? If the Soviets had gotten away with putting nuclear weapons in Cuba without the United States knowing, what would they have really used them for? Giving these questions, “[one] pattern is the long-standing assertion that the Cuban missile crisis was the Gettysburg of the Cold War –a point in time when the confronting parties faced fully the potential horrors they had unleashed by their actions and, after some sober reflection, took a step backward from the edge of the precipice of war” (Marfleet 546). This informs

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