Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missle Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse

In January 1992, the fifth in a series of conferences on the Cuban missile crisis convened in Havana, sponsored by the Center for Foreign Policy Development at Brown University. Attending were scholars and missile-crisis veterans, including Fidel Castro, former U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara and the Soviet general who supervised the 1962 deployment of the missiles in Cuba. Their freewheeling and candid discussions, spread over a four-day period, shed important new light on Soviet intentions and American intelligence weaknesses, and brought into focus the Cuban dimension of the drama and Castro's crucial role in it. Considering the prospects for an American-Cuban rapprochement, the authors suggest that ``normalization'' between the two countries is unlikely in the foreseeable future. Blight is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Foreign Policy Development at Brown University; Allyn is Project Director for the Program on Ethnic Conflicts and an adjunct at Harvard Law School; Welch teaches political science at the University of Toronto. (Nov.)