Cuban missile crisis among Castro legacies

Fidel Castro was the last of the three main protagonists in one of the Cold War's scariest episodes: The 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which raised fears of a global nuclear war.

Castro, who died Friday night at the age of 90, was aligned with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev when a 13-day showdown with US president John F. Kennedy began in October 1962.

Kennedy was assassinated a year later, on November 22, 1963, while Khrushchev died in 1971.

The Cold War heated up as never before when the United States found out Moscow was secretly building nuclear missile launchpads in Cuba.

On October 14, 1962, US reconnaissance aircraft took photographs of Soviet work on intermediate-range missile launch sites on the island.

Unwilling to allow the Soviets to position their nuclear arsenal so close to US shores, Kennedy, in unprecedented, nerve-jangling brinkmanship, warned Khrushchev that the United States would attack the Soviet Union if it did not withdraw the missiles.

The tensest days came after October 22, when Kennedy went public with what was happening, ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and mobilized 140,000 troops.

He pledged that any missile launched from Cuba would be regarded as an attack on the United States by the Soviet Union, and demanded the Soviets remove all offensive weapons from Cuba.

Castro put 400,000 of his own people on alert, anticipating a military invasion that -- it emerged years later -- was not in any of Kennedy's immediate plans.

But Kennedy at one point ordered low-level reconnaissance missions once every two hours.

On October 26, Khrushchev offered to withdraw the missiles if the United States promised not to invade Cuba and took its Jupiter missiles out of Turkey.

Castro, meanwhile, tried to set his own conditions.

He demanded the end of the US embargo on Cuba, a halt to anti-Castro attacks from the United States, a stop to US violations of Cuban airspace, and the return of the US naval base in Guantanamo, on the southeastern tip of Cuba.

Ignoring Castro's demands, Kennedy wrote on October 27 a letter to Khrushchev in which he proposed an immediate withdrawal of Soviet missiles in exchange for an end of the naval blockade.

Privately, the United States told the Soviets it would remove its missiles from Turkey once the crisis was over.

The next day, Khrushchev gave into the US terms behind Castro's back, agreeing to take the missiles out in exchange for a US pledge not to invade Cuba.

With the US giving ground only by pulling its missiles from Turkey, Castro was most unhappily left out of the deal.