page_title: Cuban Missile Crisis
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Cuban Missile Crisis / Background
context_page_description: The Cuban Missile Crisis was a time of heightened confrontation between the Soviet Union, the United States, and Cuba during the Cold War. In Russia, it is known as the Caribbean Crisis. Cuba calls it the October Crisis. It was a proxy conflict around Cuba.
  It began when the Soviet Union began building missile sites in Cuba in 1962. Together with the earlier Berlin Blockade, this crisis is seen as one of the most important confrontations of the Cold War. It may have been the moment when the Cold War came closest to a nuclear war.
  There was a coup in Cuba in 1959. A small group led by Fidel Castro took power in this Cuban Revolution. The new government took over American businesses. The American government refused to import anything from Cuba after that. The US embargo against Cuba began February 7, 1962. In 1962, the American government was worried that the USSR would attack America from Cuba, because Cuba is near enough that the missiles could reach almost any city in America. Cuba was seen by the US as a communist country, like the Soviet Union.
  In October 1962, American ships blocked Soviet ships carrying missiles from going into Cuba.
context_section_description: The Americans feared that the Soviet Union would expand communism or socialism. The US and the USSR were the main parties in the Cold War that began in 1945. The US did not want a country in the Caribbean to be openly allied with the USSR. That would also make the Monroe Doctrine useless, which kept powers in Europe from getting involved in South America.
  The US had been embarrassed publicly by the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, which had been launched under President John F. Kennedy by CIA-trained forces of Cuban exiles. Afterward, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower told Kennedy that "the failure of the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something that they would otherwise not do".
  The half-hearted Bay of Pigs invasion left Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and his advisers with the impression that Kennedy was indecisive and, as one Soviet adviser wrote, "too young, intellectual, not prepared well for decision making in crisis situations... too intelligent and too weak".
  In late 1961, Kennedy launched a number of covert operations against Castro's government. Named Operation Mongoose, they were unsuccessful. In February 1962, the US launched an economic embargo against Cuba.
  In September 1961, the Cuban government thought the US would invade because of a resolution by the US Congress to allow military force if the interests of the US in Cuba were threatened. The US also announced a military exercise in the Caribbean to be held the following month.
caption: President Kennedy meets with reconnaissance pilots and General Curtis Lemay
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