Real Dictators - Fidel Castro Part 6: The Cuban Missile Crisis

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

The first man in space arrives in Cuba for a special visit. A passenger liner from the Soviet Union docks in Havana. But it’s not carrying tourists. Out in the countryside a massive yet mysterious construction project begins. Stranger-than-fiction plans are put in motion as the CIA tries everything to assassinate Fidel. And as Khrushchev and Castro take the most daring of gambles, the whole world holds its breath… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Alvaro Alba, Mervyn Bain, Carlos Eire, Peter Kornbluh, Alex von Tunzelmann, Ileana Yarza. This is Part 6 of 10. Written by Edward White | Produced by Ed Baranski and Edward White | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design & audio editing by George Tapp, Matthew Peaty | Assembly editing by Dorry Macaulay, Anisha Deva | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cian Ryan-Morgan | Recording engineer: Joseph McGann. Get every episode of Real Dictators a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's August 7th, 1962. 8.15 a.m. We're in Havana, Cuba. The weather is typical for this time of year. Days of scorchingly hot sun punctuated by torrential, refreshing showers. This morning the capital is bright and bustling. Down by the docks, ships unload their cargo. Visitors file down gangplanks. Among the vessels decanting their contents is a passenger liner from the Soviet Union. The liner's doors open. A mass of people begin to disembark. Into the sunshine emerges a young man, dressed in a distinctly Soviet smart casual outfit, neatly pressed khaki trousers and a dark buttoned-up polo shirt. He's followed by another youngster, dressed almost identically, then another, and another.

The ship is like a Marxist Noah's Ark. Down they come, not two by two, but in rows of four, doubtless thanks to the hyper-efficiency of Soviet industrial production. They're tourists, apparently, though this cohort of foreign youths don't look much like your typical sightseers. Soon they file onto trucks. They're driven away. This isn't the first strange arrival in Cuba this summer. Not by a long shot. Havana is swamped by goods arriving from the USSR. They pile high on the docks before being distributed through the city streets. In the center of town there's gridlock.

Long convoys of huge vehicles gum up traffic as they carry the cargo out of the capital. The convoys stretch out into the provinces. Rural roads are churned underneath the weight of 18 wheelers. The rumbles and shudders break the usual tranquility of the Cuban countryside. Everything is cleared from their path. Telephone poles, post boxes, sometimes even entire houses. The convoys reach their journey's end at large construction sites. There, forests are felled, fields levelled, pipes and cables laid. Behind huge impenetrable fences, buildings are erected.

Clearly something monumental is taking shape. But nobody knows what. A few days later, Raoul Castro, the younger brother of the Prime Minister Fidel, offers a clue. In a public speech, he makes a passing reference to Soviet troops who are now arriving in Cuba. Raul declines to elaborate. People are left to puzzle, though not for long. Within weeks, the entire world will discover the shocking truth. It turns out that

Fidel Castro is taking one of history's biggest gambles. He's allowing the Soviet Union to place a massive cache of nuclear weapons on Cuban soil. And in so doing, he's putting the planet on the brink of annihilation. From the Noiza podcast network, this is part six of the Fidel Castro story. And this is Real Dictators. We pick up with Castro where we left him at the end of part five, gloating over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, a humiliation for the US President John F. Kennedy. In April 1961 the CIA had sent a force of 1400 Cuban exiles to invade the island and overthrow Castro's regime. It turns into a calamity, a huge case of overreach. Once it becomes clear that the invaders need massive additional support, Kennedy pulls

the plug. This is meant to be a Cuban-led act of liberation, not a full-scale US invasion. The whole project fizzles out. Fidel heralds it as a remarkable victory. It might be more accurate to describe it as America's epic self-defeat. Either way, more than a thousand men are imprisoned. Several months later, the U.S. secures their release in exchange for fifty-three million dollars worth of food and medicine. The entire episode only deepens the rift between the US and Castro and strengthens the bonds between Cuba and the other Cold War superpower, the Soviet Union.

Havana-Moscow relations had been advancing long before the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In the summer of 1960 the US had cancelled its long-standing order of several hundred thousand tons of Cuban sugar, a protest against Castro's nationalization of many US companies on the island. America's sworn enemy, the Soviet Union, is quick to step in and pick up the deal for itself. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev even pledges to protect Cuba from foreign aggression. Eyebrows are raised when he says that Moscow could flatten Washington with rockets, though he adds that he is, of course, referring to metaphorical rockets only.

Two months later, Castro finds himself in New York, where he speaks at the UN General Assembly. Initially, the Cuban delegation is booked to stay at the Shelburne, a ritzy hotel in mid-town Manhattan. But there's a problem. Hotel management take exception to bearded cigar-smoking revolutionaries walking around the place in army fatigues. They ban the Cubans from the dining room. So Fidel moves everybody out.

At first he threatens to have his entire party sleep beneath the stars in Central Park. But they end up at the Hotel Teresa in the heart of Harlem, perhaps the most famous black neighborhood in America. The move is taken exactly as intended, a criticism of the U.S. establishment, a message that Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution represent a challenge to American power. In Harlem, Castro makes many new friends. The radical black leader Malcolm X, counterculture poet Allen Ginsberg, Prime Minister Nehru of India. His association with them reinforces his emerging reputation outside Cuba as an exotic revolutionary

whose rhetoric, charisma, and relative youth make him a cultural phenomenon as much as a political one. But it's his encounter with Khrushchev that grabs the most attention. In front of cameras, the Cuban leader and his Russian counterpart pal around, smiling, laughing, embracing each other. They are perhaps the ultimate odd couple. The rugged, youthful Fidel appears impossibly glamorous next to Khrushchev, the head of a Soviet leadership so gray that they're difficult to see on cloudy days.

It's a case of opposites attract. Each man embodies something the other one yearns for. With Castro it's obvious. Not only is the Soviet Union a superpower, it's the greatest enemy of his foe, the United States. For Khrushchev, Castro's appeal is rather different. Professor Mervyn Bain of the University of Aberdeen is the author of Moscow and Havana, 1917 to the present. The Cuban revolution enlivens the Soviet leadership because by the late 1950s and early 1960s,

the Soviet leadership are career politicians. They hadn't participated in the Russian revolution, whereas what you have literally sitting in Cuba are revolutionaries. For Khrushchev, here's a real life young revolutionary who wants to fundamentally change things in the United States. The Soviet government can show that they're helping preserve the Cuban revolution so close to the United States. So therefore on a global scale, look what we're able to do, look what we're able to

influence. We're now spreading our influence not just globally, not just to Latin America, but to Cuba. Ninety miles from the United States and that relationship, or domination rather, of Cuba by the US before the revolution, that's all gone. It won't take long to tell you Neutrol's ingredients. Vodka. Soda, natural flavors. So what should we talk about? No sugar added?

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Fast forward a few months to July 1961. As the Bay of Pigs prisoners languish behind bars, a very special guest arrives in Havana. It's Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who's recently become the first human to journey into space. Ten-year-old Carlos Ayer is thrilled by Gagarin's visit. We've encountered Carlos in previous episodes, experiencing the violence and upheaval of Revolution Recuba. Today he goes to the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana to see his hero Gagarin and his betnoir Fidel.

There were thousands of people, and I remember standing and watching Gagarin pass by in his convertible on the street. There was genuine excitement like when Fidel marched into town. I was so thrilled to see the world's first cosmonaut. Poor man was so sunburnt. That's what I noticed. I said, man, I've never seen a sunburn like that. So the story goes, Fidel asks the great Gagarin how long it took him to orbit Earth in his

spacecraft. About an hour and a half, Gagarin replies. Castro proceeds to give a speech, twice as long, a full three hours. I got to see Fidel standing very, very far away, almost like an ant on an anthill, giving a speech. The mood was totally subdued. Of course, there would have to be clapping and cheering certain points in the speech, but Havana was all wired up to hear his speeches. In every street corner there was a speaker relaying his speech, and that was a scary

time, scary moment. He hails this visit from the Soviet Superman. The symbolism is obvious to everyone. Cuba is enthralled to the culture of communist Russia, not capitalist America. Later that year, a detail from Castro's private life is made public. This in itself is newsworthy. Fidel's personal circumstances aren't far from a state secret. So it's highly significant when it's reported that Castro's son Fidelito is to be sent to boarding school in the USSR.

It's the clearest indication yet that Fidel wants to be known as an admirer of the Soviet system. It also reflects a new pattern. To young Cubans, the Soviet Union is sold as a land of adventure full of promise. In the coming years, more and more of them will head there. Alvaro Alba was raised in Castro's Cuba. Both he and his father had their lives shaped by Soviet education. I was born in 1963 in the middle of a military family. My father, when Castro came to power in 1959, he was 16 years old.

He joined the army. He fought in the Bay of Peaks as a cadet of the military school, and after that he was sent to the military academy in the Soviet Union. Everything in my family was a green uniform, and I got to the school where there was other members of the very revolutionary families. That was the boarding school and that's the way they indoctrinate everybody because you are separated to the family. And we have the special sport complex with pool, with football

camp, with baseball camp. And for us they give all options to go to study, to East Germany, to Poland, to Bulgaria, or Soviet Union. Of course, Soviet Union was an example, was the land of the future. In Cuba at that time, there was an avalanche of the Soviet movie, the Soviet cartoon, and you saw all these beautiful steps in Russian, white with the snow, or this and you want to travel there, especially when you're living in the island. Sometimes you feel that the island is not enough for you, that you want to see something more. On December the 1st, 1961, Castro gives his latest televised speech. In it, he performs what one might call an ideological coming out.

I am a Marxist Leninist, he proudly declares, and shall remain a Marxist Leninist until the day I die. In Cuba, this is profoundly significant. For whatever Fidel is, the revolution is too. And wherever Fidel leads, his most adoring supporters follow. It's a process of radicalization that causes ructions in countless ordinary families. Ileana Yaza had first encountered Fidel Castro in 1959. She was a teenager then, working in the hotel that Fidel had made his headquarters. She saw him up close and immediately fell under his spell. Three years on, she's a revolutionary zealot. Her middle-class conservative relatives were appalled.

I remember there was a lot of controversy, even I had a lot of controversies with my parents, because they said, why would you become a communist? And I said, I don't know, am I becoming a communist? Why am I becoming a communist? Why am I becoming a communist? For fall, if you tell, of course he is communist. Well, if he is communist, then I'm communist. I'll let me tell you something, it damaged my relationship

with my parents. Really damaged. Which made me feel guilty for years, but then you realize I had a right to choose. Castro's self-identification as a Marxist-Leninist doesn't go down well in Washington. Though, in American eyes, he's already a lost cause. Following the Bay of Pigs, cutting Castro down to size has become a fixation among senior figures in the U.S. government. With President Kennedy's involvement, the CIA launches a new strategy for getting rid of Kastra. It's called Operation Mongoose. Peter Kombler, senior analyst at the National Security

Archive. Kennedy basically authorized a whole new set of covert operations. They were much broader than the ones the CIA had been undertaking before the Bay of Pigs. The new set of covert operations. They were much broader than the ones the CIA had been undertaking before the Bay of Pigs. The new sets of covert operations had basically three components. One was to destabilize Cuba economically and cause mass kind of resistance inside the country. Two was to create an actual pretext for invading Cuba so that there

could be a specific date. And three, and somewhat unknown to most people at the time even within these operations, you know, rather escalated effort to assassinate Fidel Castro to decapitate the Cuban leadership and make it easier to overthrow the Castro regime. throw the Castro regime. Those efforts lead the Americans into some unusual territory. Author and historian Alex von Tunselman. Operation Mongos was completely bonkers. Annual budget of 50 million US dollars in 1961, which was an incredible amount of

money. Most of the records were deliberately destroyed in 1967. So a lot of it we don't know, but some of what we do know is absolutely bananas. There was operations like Operation Freeride, which would drop one way air tickets to Mexico all over Cuba. There were ideas to have a fake attack on Guantanamo Bay stage so that the US could invade. One plan was an airdrop of lavatory paper printed with Fidel Castro's face being dropped all over Cuba. There were also all sorts of kind of complicated ways to kill him. So there were poison cigars, there was an exploding cigar that they made. One of Fidel Castro's big hobbies was diving, so they tried to create a

poison diving suit with fungal spores that would create a skin disorder and kill him. A poison aqualung that would squirt contaminants straight into his mouth. And there was one sort of comic point where the head of the CIA's Cuban task force proposed creating a seashell that Fidel Castro would pick up when he was diving that would explode and kill him. And at this point, one CIA agent said, how are we going to make Fidel pick up that shell? Are we going to put a neon sign on it

and have it play Beethoven's fifth? So Kennedy started to engage in these. They didn't, again, not surprisingly, didn't quite work out the way he wanted them to. And plus, they gave the Soviet Union the ability to basically say to Castro, look, Kennedy administration is going to try doing this again and the second time they're not going to allow for any failures. And so you need our support.

Nikita Khrushchev proposes something beyond bold. As he puts it, why not throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam's pants? Khrushchev sent a team of specialists and advisors to Cuba with a proposal. Let us install nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles as a deterrent to a future U.S. invasion that we all know is going to come sooner or later. Castro saw the wisdom of this from a defensive purpose. He also believed that the United States would try and invade again. He wasn't going to just sit there. The Soviets were offering a deterrent system.

From Castro's point of view, they should just openly put the missiles in, but the Soviets knew that they wouldn't be able to do that, so they attempted to do it surreptitiously. Castro has sound reasons for wanting the missile deal conducted in the open. If the world knows about it from the start, Cuba can claim it's a purely defensive measure. The US and everyone else is being put on notice. Invading Cuba could have cataclysmic repercussions. But if done secretly, there's the risk that the US will find out while the missiles are

being put in place. In that scenario, Cuba will look mightily suspicious, as though it's planning an attack. Khrushchev, like Castro, is a born risk-taker. He's insistent. This must be a clandestine operation. In any event, he assures the Cubans, nothing will go wrong. Moscow knows exactly what it's doing. In the summer of 1962, the weapons arrive in Cuba.

There is no public announcement, but inevitably word goes around the island that something is happening. Huge ships cross the Atlantic carrying the missiles, enormous lorries criss-cross Cuba, thousands of Soviet citizens appear on the island. It would be impossible to keep a mission of this size totally secret. And not only from Cubans. Reports make their way to Washington. Soviet soldiers are swarming the island, they say. Colossal cargo hidden beneath Tarpaulin are powering their way all over the countryside. Gossip and rumor always abound in Cuba. US intelligence has learned to take eyewitness accounts

with a large pinch of salt. Even so, the volume of similar sounding stories is striking. On October the 14th, 1962, a U-2 spy plane from the US Air Force flies over the island. It's a routine flight, the type that the Americans have been performing for years. But today, something out of the ordinary is visible on the ground, in the area of San Cristobal. When the plane returns to the US, the photographic record is reviewed. To the untrained eye, the images don't reveal much, little more than a row of tents, a kind of campsite perhaps, in a clearing surrounded by tall tropical palm trees. But to the analysts at the CIA, this is horribly familiar.

It resembles the basic layout of a Soviet ballistic missile base. And the CIA aren't scrutinizing these photos cold. Recently, they've been given top-secret information by a mole in the upper echelons of the Soviet military. When cross-referenced with that, the pictures tell a terrifying story. Cuba is going nuclear. Early on the morning of October 16, President Kennedy is briefed.

In the coming days further, U-2 flights furnish new evidence. At least 30 intermediate-range ballistic missiles are photographed. Kennedy is deluged with calls for war. Hawks within the military establishment urge the president to launch a full-scale invasion. Well initially, Kennedy and most of his top aides come to almost a consensus that they're going to have a series of bombing raids to take out these weapons. Kennedy did have a change of heart about this after about two days of deliberations, in

part because when he asked his military officers if we bomb all these sites, are we sure to get rid of all the missiles? They couldn't guarantee that. Plus, the issue was how many Russian and Soviet soldiers and technicians are we going to kill when we bomb these sites? And the CIA told him there were, I don't know, 9, 11,000 Soviet soldiers, most of them working on these missile sites. In truth, there were, I don't know, nine, 11,000 Soviet soldiers, most of them working on these missile sites. In truth, there were over 40,000. And Kennedy's concern was when he started killing Soviet soldiers on the island of Cuba through bombing raids, what was Khrushchev going to do

in response? What would be the military pressure on Khrushchev? The president resolves to hold off on military action. Ironically, the decision is informed by a flaw in U.S. intelligence. All Kennedy's advisors are agreed. The Cuban missiles don't yet possess nuclear warheads. But the analysis is wrong. The Cuban missiles in fact do possess nuclear warheads. It's a misapprehension of huge significance.

One of the fascinating things about the missile crisis is that we now know it was actually far more dangerous than even was thought at the time because the American policy was based on the presumption that what had been installed in Cuba was missile launchers, missile bases, you know, the structure for missiles, but that the actual warheads were on this naval fleet that was coming to Cuba. And in fact, in the 1990s, Fidel Castro revealed that in fact, no, he already had quite a lot of nuclear warheads in Cuba by the time that happened.

And a lot of these were the same sort of size as bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were very, very big bombs or even bigger. And Cuba's ambassador to the UN said that most of the Soviet troops in Cuba, for the big weapons, they had to, of course, refer to Moscow before they fired them. But some of the small ones, they actually had authorization to go ahead and fire themselves. So this was an unbelievably dangerous situation that the Americans actually didn't know they were dealing with something quite this bad. At midday on October the 22nd, it's announced that President Kennedy will appear on television

later that evening. He is to address the nation on a topic of great importance. Both Khrushchev and Castro immediately grasp the situation. The Americans have discovered the missiles. Castro puts Cuba on a war footing. About half an hour before Kennedy is due to make his broadcast, Fidel officially mobilizes the island's entire military, as well as the public militia. Half a million Cubans are braced for a fight to the death. At 7 p.m. Kennedy appears on TV. Looking straight down the camera, he makes the most important speech of his life.

He tells his audience of a secret plot by Khrushchev and Castro. Cuba is amassing a vast array of Soviet-supplied missiles just 90 miles from the US coast. The safety of the United States and the free world is in peril. He makes no mention of preemptive attacks. Instead, there is to be what he calls a naval quarantine, effectively a military blockade. Kennedy is walking a tightrope between peace and World War III. Soon US ships crowd Cuba. The aim is to cut the island off from the Soviet Union, preventing the arrival of any

further arms, including the nuclear warheads that are, in fact, already in place. The Soviet ships don't turn back. They press ahead toward the Caribbean. The players are all in position. The world holds its breath. For two days the standoff persists. The Soviet fleet creeps ever closer to Cuba.

In Moscow, Khrushchev is ruin his decision to install the weapons covertly. If the deal had been done in the open from the start, Washington wouldn't have uncovered what looks like secret preparations for an attack. The panic of the last few days would have been avoided. On October 24, Khrushchev decides that he must call the Soviet ships to halt. The most immediate threat of all-out war has been averted. Khrushchev then writes to President Kennedy. His tone is conciliatory, his words measured, his sentiment seemingly from the heart. He assures Kennedy that the weapons are defensive.

The Soviet Union has no desire for war. The letter is warmly received at the White House. Kennedy believes Khrushchev to be sincere. It gives him further cause to push for a peaceful settlement. Fidel Castro, however, has no such faith. He is convinced an American invasion of Cuba is imminent, and the way he sees it, an attack by the US won't be the start of a conflict, so much as a prelude to national martyrdom.

Full-on nuclear war is just a heartbeat away, and it will begin in Cuba. All across the island, preparations are made. Havana's golden beaches and seafront promenades are clogged with barbed wire. Anti-aircraft guns point to the skies. Castro gives orders that any American planes flying within range are to be shot down. But he has only rather meager weapons at his disposal. The advanced surface-to-air missiles on the island are under the control of the Soviet

military. If those are deployed, the conflict will escalate and it'll be completely out of Castro's hands. We were expecting an invasion. I even had a bag ready with canned meat and canned milk for the baby if we had to go together. So we expected that it would happen. I remember when the Russian base was opened. Many people saw that as a salvation. When I say many people, I'm talking about the people in my work, the people of the militia, and the people of all the revolutionary organizations

that I was a member of since the beginning. Then the Communist Party, we were happy, we felt protected from the Americans. In the dark days of the missile crisis, however, it seems to many that rather than protecting Cuba, the Soviet Union has placed the island directly in harm's way. At midnight on October 27, Castro is in deep discussion with his cabinet. He tells them of his conviction that the island will soon be swarming with American invaders. Around 2am the cabinet disperses. Exhausted and filled with dreadful expectancy, they go home for some much needed sleep.

Except for Fidel. It's his habit to conduct business late into the night. Journalists and diplomats frequently find themselves summoned to meet him in the small hours. Some believe it reflects an inability or unwillingness to switch off. Fidel is addicted to being Fidel around the clock. Others wonder if it isn't all part of the performance, the calculated mythmaking of an egomaniac for whom presentation and projection are everything. But there can be no doubt that today's early morning shift is vital. Fueled by bottles of beer and pork sausages, Videl sets to work.

He composes a letter to Nikita Khrushchev, outlining his position at this moment, when the future of the world rests on a knife edge. Sat next to him is the Soviet ambassador, Alexander Alekseyev. It's his task to take down Castro's thoughts before sending them to the Kremlin. Never one for economical expression. Castro's Spanish is often florid and complex. He writes draft after draft, tearing each one up when he decides that his precise meaning hasn't been captured. The ambassador is discomfited by what he hears. It appears that Castro is urging Moscow to launch a nuclear strike in the event of an

invasion of Cuba. As they were drafting it, Alexeyev said, Do you actually mean this? Do you think the USSR should launch a first nuclear strike against the United States if they attack? And Fidel said, I don't want to say that directly, but under certain circumstances, we must not wait to experience the perfidy of the imperialists, letting them initiate the first strike and deciding that Cuba should be wiped off the face of the earth. Eventually Castro is satisfied.

The letter is finished. It begins its long journey to Russia. Around the same time that Castro's letter is dispatched, an American U-2 surveillance plane soars out across Florida. It's headed for Cuba, more specifically the area around Guantanamo Bay, where the US has a military base. Soviet officers stationed on the island watch in consternation. Unbeknownst to the Americans, crews' missiles have recently been positioned nearby. They're primed to hit the US base at Guantanamo should the need arise. It's another so-called defensive maneuver that

could easily be interpreted as a flagrant act of aggression. The plane buzzes overhead. Any surveillance intel taken here could have an enormous impact on an already extremely tense situation. But to take action against a U.S. aircraft could also trigger the Americans. And once that first domino falls, the others are likely to follow. There's not much time to grind through the options. A potentially world-changing decision is needed right now. The U-2 pulls eastwards. Its survey of Guantanamo looks to be over. Soon it will be out of Cuban airspace.

The Soviets in charge of the surface-to-air missiles make their choice. At 10.19, two missiles are fired. They roar through the sky. The impact with the U-2 is decisive. The plane is immediately destroyed. The pilot is killed on impact. And the surveillance footage of the missiles aimed at Guantanamo is no more. Now the ball is back in Kennedy's court.

Senior military figures push yet again for an invasion. The US cannot allow its aircraft to be shot out of the sky without severe repercussions. But still the president resists. He senses that Khrushchev genuinely desires peace. The next step must be diplomatic, not military. Kennedy knows that the presence of U.S. nuclear missiles near Turkey's border with Russia rankles Moscow. It's this that offers a chink of light.

Kennedy sent his own brother to meet the Soviet ambassador in Washington to offer a secret deal. We will promise to withdraw our missiles in Turkey six or eight months from now, very quietly. If you, in the next 24 hours, announce that you are pulling out those missiles, we'll publicly say we agree to a non-invasion pledge. And then down the line secretly without anybody being told that this was part of our quid pro quo We will eliminate the missiles that are really bothering you the missiles in Turkey Kennedy stresses the times of the essence

With tensions so high and the pressure to act decisively so great on both sides of the conflict, something drastic is needed to put the brakes on this runaway train. On that point, Khrushchev is in total agreement. Not long before Kennedy's offer arrives in Moscow on the evening of October the 27th. Castro's letter is received by Kremlin officials. Soon its contents are communicated to Khrushchev. Fidel's talk of first strikes and destroying entire countries renders the Soviet premier speechless. Nikita Khrushchev completely freaked out.

He was absolutely horrified to read this. And in fact, Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, when this message was read aloud to us, we sat there in silence looking at one another for a long time. It became clear at this point that Fidel absolutely did not understand our intentions. Some perceive that the nuance Castro had tried so hard to work into his original letter in Havana is lost by the time it makes its way to Moscow. It's complicated by the issue of language.

He dictated that letter in Spanish and sent it to Moscow, where it was translated into Russian for Khrushchev to read. So the original language of Spanish and Fidel's dictation has somewhat been lost. It was largely interpreted as Fidel Castro urging a first nuclear strike and cast as his idea that just out of the blue, the Soviet Union should launch a nuclear attack on the United States. The letter was much different though. It basically argued that the United States was

about to invade Cuba, and that in Fidel's mind, the invasion of Cuba was the first step to the United States launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. And he basically said to Khrushchev, if they invade Cuba, you should respond with your nuclear arsenal before you are obliterated, because you will be next.

Irrespective of Castro's precise intentions, his letter has a profound effect. Khrushchev saw this as clear evidence of how out of control this whole situation had become. Nikita Khrushchev had lived through World War II. He had seen the vast mass destruction and death of millions of Russians around him. He was trying to create a deterrence for the Cubans and for the Russians against encroaching U.S. nuclear threats in Europe and elsewhere. Basically, his argument was, if the United States can put nuclear weapons on our doorstep, on our border, why can't we put nuclear weapons on their border? Kind of the fundamentals of deterrence.

But obviously, his idea was a horrible, wrong-headed miscalculation and a terrible thing to do to put these missiles into Cuba and put the world at risk. Nikita Khrushchev tried to find a way out. A couple of hours later, Khrushchev receives the Kennedy proposal to de-escalate the situation. It doesn't take the Soviet leader long to make up his mind. On the morning of October 28, Washington learns of Moscow's next move. The USSR is to dismantle the missile sites in Cuba with immediate effect. The US government breathes a giant sigh of relief. The world's two great superpowers have, almost by accident, marched the planet to the brink of destruction, and marched it all the way back down again. But there's one snag.

Nobody has told Fidel Castro. During the last two weeks, Fidel has gone out of his way to project himself as a tower of strength. No matter how overbearing the Yankee imperialists get, Fidel will be with his people. Together they will stand proud until the very moment they all fall down dead. In years to come, Cuban propaganda will spread clearly apocryphal stories. One such tale has Castro himself firing the surface-to-air missile that brought down the U-2 spy plane. Outside Cuba, however, Castro is treated as an incidental player at best, and at worst, a madman with a death wish. If it's respect that he craves, from allies and adversaries alike,

the 13 days of the missile crisis are a crushing disappointment and a public humiliation. As Washington and Moscow step back from nuclear war, Cuba's strongman is in Havana. According to Che Guevara, he's with Fidel, deep in conversation about some pressing military matter when the phone rings. Fidel takes hold of the receiver. A journalist is at the end of the line. The reporter asks if he has any comment to make. About what? asks Fidel. It's now that he hears, for the first time,

that the Soviet Union has complied with the US demand to remove its missiles from Cuba. The notion seems ridiculous. Fidel said, that's not true, that's absolute nonsense, Rostchev will never back down, you know, we've got the missiles. And the journalists then read out Rostchev's statement saying that, yes, we're going to withdraw them. And so what Che Guevara says is Fidel swore, as did I, and to get rid of the tension, he whirled around and quickly kicked the wall.

A huge mirror hung in that spot. It was shattered by the impact and crashed into a noisy shower of glass. For nearly four years, Fidel has been all-powerful in Cuba. At times it seemed that the wind only changes direction with his express permission. It is he who recently declared the ideological character of the revolution. Just twenty-four hours earlier he'd assured the leader of the Soviet Union that his nation was prepared to martyr itself, as though the decision were his alone to make. But then the Soviets had taken the step of shooting an American plane out of the Cuban skies without his knowledge.

And now Khrushchev has excluded him from negotiations about his own country's security arrangements. Fidel regards it as a gross insult to Cuba and to himself. In his mind, there may not even be a distinction between the two. He really kind of, for a moment, broke relations actually between Cuba and the Soviet Union. They ripped down Soviet symbols and trampled upon them all over Cuba. And there was this little rhyme that went around school children, which was Nikita Marikita, lo que se da no se quita,

which is Spanish for Nikita, you little fairy, what you give you can't take back. Villar Castro felt deeply humiliated with what had happened. He had realized that, you know, for all his fantasies of martyrdom and this kind of great man destiny, that he was just a little man leading, you know, in world terms a relatively small country. And I think that was incredibly humiliating for him. To save face, Castro fires off a statement. He lists a number of conditions that must be met before he will accept the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement.

Really, he's in no position to make demands. None of them are taken seriously. But Castro refuses to be ignored. Under the peace deal, a team of weapons inspectors will travel to Cuba to confirm that all nuclear weapons have been removed. No chance, says Castro. Even when the head of the United Nations makes a special visit to Cuba, he won't budge. Ultimately the weapons inspectors have to settle for viewing photographs of the dismantled

equipment. This could be interpreted as quite a victory for Cuba, an assertion of its national sovereignty. And indeed in one sense, the missile crisis has ended rather well for Fidel Castro. America's public pledge not to invade Cuba is precisely what his government has been seeking for years. But that doesn't lift Castro's mood. Over the coming months he descends into an enormous sulk. Some say it's more than that. He drinks and smokes but loses weight and appears to age. The humiliation seems to have edged him into depression. The storm clouds don't lift until early 1963. It's then that Fidel receives a letter from his erstwhile pal Nikita Khrushchev. It's an extraordinary document, a full 31 pages.

Khrushchev pours his heart out. He stresses the importance of Castro's friendship with the Soviet Union. He also underlines the need for their respective people to stand together against capitalism and US imperialism. The letter pushes all the right buttons. It concludes with an invitation to tour the Soviet Union. Khrushchev guarantees a rapturous welcome from both politicians and the people. Fidel is suitably flattered.

Almost overnight, the negative articles about the Soviet Union that had been peppering the Cuban press in recent months disappear. In April, Castro leaves Cuba for a five-week jaunt to the crucible of international communism. There's a huge tour of the Soviet Union. And again, he's still young at this point. So he has this real-life, actual revolutionary in the Soviet Union, rather than these career politicians. There's this huge welcome in the Lennon Stadium in Moscow

where I think it's 100,000 people where they are. In less than a year from now, the Beatles will trigger fits of excitement when they travel to the United States. Fidel's visit is probably the closest the Soviet Union gets to Beatlemania. Ironic, considering he will one day ban their records from Cuba, branding their music everything that's worst about the liberal capitalist West. Fidel breaks protocol, wanders

off-piste, shakes hands, grins and laughs with the ordinary people he meets. Not that the hype is always welcome, mind you. When Castro gets bored one night and takes an impromptu stroll through Red Square, it causes conniptions among the Russian bodyguards charged with protecting him. But still, Cuba and Castro, or at least an idea of those things, earns a special place in the hearts and minds of the Soviet people. Once the Soviets start sending more military personnel or technicians to Cuba, an affinity grows up between these Soviet citizens and Cuba, the Cuban Revolution as well.

It's also, well, it's a Caribbean island. It's quite a nice place to be posted. So there's almost this kind of romanticism of Cuba and Fidel Castro emerges. Fidel is warmed by the Soviet welcome as Yuri Gagarin was by the intense Cuban sun on his visit to Havana two years earlier. But the trip is about more than simply nourishing Castro's colossal ego. At the end of the visit, the two leaders issue a joint communique. Cuba is recognized as a communist state, Marxist brothers in a utopian global project.

And Castro is given the seal of approval as the leader of this communist tropical paradise, a stone's throw from the American Empire. Fidel returns home with the wind at his back. He has the support of Moscow to push the Cuban Revolution forward, shaping the island in his image. Over the next few years, that endeavor will take Cuba into strange new places that nobody yet can imagine. In the next episode, Castro sets out to create a breed of new people, turning Cuba into an island of mini-Fidels. Hot dog vendors are declared counter-revolutionary, the calendar is altered, and Castro becomes

obsessed with the dairy industry, declaring the advent of a new Cuban super cow. But as networks of spies and labor camps for gay people are established, Fidel's own sister will flee, declaring Cuba a floating prison. And as one of Castro's most famous allies is killed, the revolution will be rocked to its foundations. That's next time.