The Morning After

After the heady experience came headachy doubts and morning-after questions.

Hardly had Nikita Khrushchev promised to back away from his Cuba missiles adventure than the Kennedy Administration started warning journalists not to get too encouraged, not to use words like "capitulation," not to assume that the "hard line" was applicable to all fronts of the cold war.

From that moment on, some of the momentum seemed to go out of the U.S.'s new drive against Soviet Communism and Castro's Cuba.

The Angry Man. Khrushchev had not only agreed to dismantle his missiles and to remove them from Cuba; he had professed himself willing to have United Nations inspectors oversee the withdrawal. This was a basic U.S. condition. But arrangements for the inspection became confused when they were placed in the hands of the U.N. and its Acting Secretary-General U Thant.

Thant organized a 19-man team to go to Cuba. At his urgent request, the U.S. obligingly lifted its blockade and aerial surveillance. Thant flew to Havana--and ran into a cold climate. Ordinarily, Fidel Castro is one of the world's most assiduous airport greeters. But he did not show up to welcome Thant, and when the two finally did meet, Castro had his gat ostentatiously bolstered on his hip. In his long, rambling talks, Castro sputtered that Khrushchev had sold him down the river. As to the bargain the Russian Premier had made with Kennedy, Castro cried: "I have not once been consulted."

Castro angrily ruled out any U.N. inspection of the missiles in Cuba. He also rejected a compromise proposal that the job be done by the International Red Cross. And he ticked off five conditions that he said must be met before he would consider any sort of agreement 1) the U.S. must move out of the Guantanamo naval base, 2) end its economic blockade, 3) quit aiding "subversive activities," 4) abandon "pirate attacks," and 5) stop the "violation" of Cuba's air and sea space.

Enter the Salesman. U Thant returned from Cuba murmuring diplomatically that the talks had been "fruitful." With their strutting puppet causing an impasse, the Russians announced that Anastas Mikoyan, Khrushchev's First Deputy Premier and the U.S.S.R.'s most amiable salesman, would go to Cuba. There was an understandable notion that Mikoyan would lay down the law to Castro, ordering him to get out of the big boys' way. But on his way to Havana, Mikoyan stopped off in New York for chats at the U.N., declared that U.S. news stories about his visit to Cuba were "absolutely groundless guesses and fantasies." What was more, Mikoyan strongly endorsed Castro's preposterous propositions. The Soviet Union, said Mikoyan, "considers them just."

When Mikoyan landed in Havana, there was Castro to give him a whiskery embrace, and there were the children of Soviet embassy personnel to present bouquets to him and the Cuban leader, who held his as though it were a handful of plucked chicken feathers. The two men then disappeared into a government building to work out what Castro blandly described as "discrepancies." Mikoyan still went out of his way to praise Russia's troublesome Caribbean ally. "The Soviet people are with Cuba body and soul," he told a Cuban newspaper. "I, for my part, wish to be one more soldier of revolutionary Cuba."

Shipped or Stored? After U Thant returned to New York, the U.S. resumed its naval blockade of Cuba. Fresh from a two-day respite in Puerto Rico, where he engaged in his favorite sport of skin-diving, Vice Admiral Alfred G. Ward went back to sea to command Task Force 136. Once again, low-flying jet reconnaissance planes screeched over Cuba to photograph the state of the Soviet nuclear missiles.

The first pictures brought back of four medium-range missile sites indicated that the Russians were indeed dismantling their missiles. Some missile launchers had been removed, trailers and tents had vanished, and some areas had been plowed and bulldozed over. One picture showed a truck convoy moving away from a base.

But inspection remained the key against Communist deception. Cuban exiles and other intelligence sources were desperately warning that not all the missile equipment was being put aboard ships for return to the Soviet Union. Instead, they claimed, much of it was being stored in a long-prepared system of underground arsenals in Cuba's mountain fastnesses. To be sure, many of these sources had an ax to grind; they were embittered by the prospect of Castro's being allowed to survive, with or without Soviet missiles. But they had been startlingly accurate in their warnings of the missile buildup even before President Kennedy was convinced of it.

Rising Doubts. Castro's refusal to allow inspection was further proof of something that should have been explosively apparent all along: as long as he is in power, there will be a Caribbean crisis. During the agonizing days of week before last, President Kennedy and Russia's Khrushchev exchanged many messages. Some of them have still to be made public (see cover), and in others there were some statements that went largely unnoticed in the U.S.'s enthusiasm over Khrushchev's backdown. Thus, Kennedy at one point declared that the U.S. would be willing to work out a deal that gave "assurances against an invasion of Cuba" --provided, of course, that the missiles were removed and inspectors were allowed to enter Cuba.

That declaration shook a lot of people, who took it to mean that the U.S. would never invade Cuba under any circumstances. Said New York's Senator Kenneth Keating, who had been warning of the Soviet missile buildup since September: "We must be very wary about any pact which will tie our hands in preventing the spread of Communism to other countries in the Caribbean." Said a Latin American Ambassador to the U.S.: "It is to be hoped that we all do not contemplate another Bay of Pigs type failure of purpose. We are all ready to go now, but tomorrow Castro may confuse or subvert some of the very governments that are the most eager to finish him off."

To reassure the worried Latin American nations, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had to call a hasty briefing of their ambassadors in Washington, declared that the U.S. had no intention of underwriting Castro's future. Continuing U.S. policy, he said, is to squeeze Castro to death with political and economic pressures. Moreover, Rusk explained that the "no invasion" pledge applied only to a satisfactory settlement of the missile crisis. If Castro tries to export Communism by force, the U.S. will still feel free to invade the island.

Talk & Sabotage. This assurance was less than persuasive to Latin Americans, who know all too well that Castro has been and still is trying to export Communism by subterfuge and sabotage. Just last week saboteurs, acting on Castro's orders, touched off explosions in Venezuela that damaged four key power stations in the rich oilfields along Lake Maracaibo (see THE HEMISPHERE). As if this were not enough, the Communists at week's end blew up four Venezuelan pipelines. Such acts, presumably, were the sort that President Kennedy had vowed to answer by invasion. Yet, as of last week, there was no U.S. protest or action.

While the diplomats were talking and Castro was sending out his saboteurs, the U.S. military buildup went on. Four LST troopships showed up at Fort Lauderdale, one at anchor in the channel and three nosed up to the beach with their bow doors open like yawning hippopotamuses. The 14,000 Air Force reservists that had been ordered to active duty were told that they might have to serve as long as one year. The Tactical Air Command had fighter-bombers and troop transports ready to go. The Strategic Air Command was on combat alert, with a fleet of B-52 bombers carrying nuclear bombs in the air at all times.

While all this was going on, President Kennedy continued in deep consultation with his advisers, stayed mostly out of public view. At one point he did schedule a press conference--which would have been his first in seven weeks. Then he canceled it. Instead, he appeared on television for a 2 1/2-minute speech. During that talk, he announced what had already been released by the Pentagon--that recon photos indicated the Soviets were dismantling their missiles. He said that the U.S. would agree to having the International Red Cross take over from Task Force 136 the job of stopping and inspecting Cuba-bound ships. He said that progress was being made toward the restoration of peace in the Caribbean.*

At week's end, the White House stated that the U.S. would insist upon ground inspection of the Soviet missile sites in Cuba before agreeing to any settlement. But there was some talk that the Administration might be willing to have the International Red Cross do the inspecting instead of the U.N.

As the long wait went on, there could still be no doubt that the U.S. Government, acting courageously and cannily, had forced Russia's Khrushchev to back away from his Cuban foray. But as the days went by, there was the feeling that the U.S. might also be letting great gains for freedom slip away.

*In wording that could only have distressed his old Harvard professors, he concluded: "It is our firm hope and purpose that this progress shall go forward."

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