Who came out ahead out of the Cuban missile crisis?

by KatzChat

I was wondering if either side profited from the incident. Is it even fair to say that one side "won the incident"?

restricteddata

The Soviets certainly did not. They lost what they hoped was a useful gambit, and the most they got out of it from a strategic standpoint was the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey which, while irritating to them, were not a significant factor in the overall US war-fighting strategy. The Crisis was one of the reasons that Khrushchev was removed from power.

The US gained a major political victory, with Kennedy looking stronger than he had before and effectively stopping Soviet attempts to press an advantage. So I suppose you can count that as a gain. Overall you could claim that both had a "gain" in the sense that there was a deescalation of direct brinksmanship for some time afterwards, and a settling in to a sort of status quo that would lead, eventually, to detente. The "gain" here would be mutual, in that the security situation of each became somewhat less pressing and fraught.

It has sometimes been argued that Castro reaped the biggest gains. Aside from not perishing in a terrible fire, he effectively secured a guarantee from the US not to invade his island, was able to translate his defiance to the US as a political victory domestically, and more or less guaranteed the persistence of his rule. It was quite common, up until a few years ago, to point out that of the major leaders at the time, only Castro was still alive, and still in power. Prior to the Crisis, that would have seemed like an unlikely long-term outcome, given the US's position towards Cuba going Communist.

I think, in general, that the question of "who won" is not a very good one, however, though I cannot say that historians have not argued about it. To see international crises in terms of "winners" and "losers" is an understandable framework, but one that ends up excluding more nuanced reads, and one that potentially encourages a zero-sum mindset among policymakers. For example, the "old" way of reading the Crisis (which is still quite common popularly) was to see it as a Kennedy victory because he stood up to Khrushchev and the latter blinked. This was the way the Kennedy people told the story, anyway, to their obvious political advantage. In more recent decades, however, the amount of compromise on the US side has been emphasized, as was the fact that the US had, to some degree, manufactured the urgency of the Crisis to its political gain, putting the world in great peril. Such is a mindset that doesn't really see the "winners" and "losers" as the issue.

There are many books, etc., written about the Crisis. Dobb's One Minute to Midnight is pretty good. I would definitely recommend looking at McNamara's later feelings about it as represented in his interview for Errol Morris' Fog of War, and might also suggest reading Schwartz's article ("The Real Cuban Missile Crisis") in The Atlantic for additional perspectives.