Mindless missile madness fell into John Kennedy’s lap in 1962. The Cuban Crisis was probably the closest the world every came to full-blown nuclear war. Cubans called it the October Crisis, and Russians called it the Caribbean Crisis. I guess it’s all about perspective.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

What would Uncle Harry have done, comrade? If the buck had stopped on his presidential desk? Diplomacy prevailed. It must have been the rosaries. We were getting pretty close to the quota, I guess, but the price to be paid for cataclysmic brinksmanship was growing fear, which, in turn, powered up the MAD doctrine. Deterrence, to keep the Cold War cold, the white man white, and the rich man rich. That was what was supposed to keep little children safe, but it turned out to be the most dangerous game. How close we came, in ’62, I think we will never really know.

Deterrence through compensatory saber rattling was, also, very expensive. Each weapon had an exorbitant cost of production. That made some people immortally wealthy, and wealth made them luxuriously insensitive. And, there was the very tricky business of public secrets. Deterrence only worked if highly classified intel were also public knowledge. Truth, as a notion, became a relative concept, as unstable, in this expanding universe, as matter, time and energy.

Keeping people safe was dangerous. Rockets had to be maintained and every man and woman in the loop already knew too much. It was a deadly game of chess, and way too many people were positioned such that they could walk away with some of the pieces. Or, learn enough make their own. So then, you had to train someone else to spy on them, and could you trust your spies?

The Cold War was a lot like playing Monopoly. Everybody got their own sphere of influence, and a turn to roll the dice. The British were not squeamish about calling a spade, a fucking shovel. Churchill could still stand on a soap box and talk about Her Majesty’s Empire, without batting an eye. But Americans and Soviets had to deal with ideological tangles of liberty and justice. There was Puritan predestination to consider, and rigorous devotion to the necessary historical process.

Spheres of influence worked for everybody. But, there were a few hot spots on the map, disputed places, like West Berlin, Vietnam and Cuba. It never was the whole pie. And the hot spots kept the game going. There was so 
much money to be made. Monopoly money…

When Cuba applied for Soviet protection, Nikita should have told them to go straight to atheist hell, comrade. He knew the rules of Yalta. Getting involved would become a huge diplomatic problem for him. But, on the other hand, it was an even huger strategic windfall, if he could pull it off. A place to stand up his rockets. And he thought he could. He thought JFK had no balls. But he did. Two, in fact.

But by then, the Cubans were stuck. Fidel had earned for them a blockade that never ends; yes, goes on and on my friends. With no gasoline to run the fleet of ’57 Chevy’s (still the only cars on The Island, comrade) and no one to buy their one export item, white cane sugar, revolutionary Cuba needed to hold on to its new Big Brother. American coldness had driven Comrade Fidel into the cruel Soviet embrace. No puedo vivir sin ti... But Fidel expected it to be better than it was. He thought he would be cherished. Nikita treated him like a whore.

You don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I could mold you into someone who could cherish me as much as I cherish you... The Association, 1964.  

Puritans usually find their whorehouses across borders, in exotic lands where people wear skimpy clothes, speak hot languages, eat spicy food and move their hips when they walk. The Island was all of that for the United States, under Fulgencio. But the rumba ground to a halt after the revolution. Cuba wanted to feel like a virgin, making love for the very first time, but she had to sell her spicy tropical services across the wine-dark sea. To smelly guys wearing furry hats. 

The revolution of ‘59 was warmly received by the self-righteous for about a year. Fidel had gotten rid of Fulgencio. Fulgencio had provided whores for generations of Puritans, but he made them feel uncomfortable. He was such a pimp. He was a drug dealer, a gun-runner and a ruthless torturer. Whatever your suppressed desires were, he could supply you, with help from Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello. But American tycoons felt a little guilty about that. Fidel destroyed the near occasion of sin. Jack Parr, host of The Tonight Show, celebrated the victory.

Puritan party animals had to look for another venue, where their cold white god couldn’t see their hot dark sins. There’s always Vegas; it’s practically a foreign country. Or, Bali, it’s where Japanese Puritans go. But they missed Cuba. It was close. You could ride over any evening on your yacht. And you could get anything you wanted there. Before ‘59. Lucille Ball even found a husband there, and they were quite the enterprise.

Desiderio Arnaz III was the son of a wealthy landowner from Santiago. His grandfather on his mother’s side was an executive at Bacardi Rum. Arnaz Jr., later to become Lucille’s father-in-law, found himself on the wrong side of the political fence in 1933, when an earlier revolution brought General Fulgencio Batista to power. Don Desiderio was jailed and exiled to Miami. All his property was confiscated and used to build Fulgencio’s casinos and whorehouses.

The Arnaz family belonged to the first wave of Cuban exiles, the ones who were happy to see Batista bite the dust. But Desiderio III didn’t go back to Cuba in ‘59. He had a red-headed gringa for a wife. And he was doing pretty well selling the Cuban style in the States.

Desiderio III met Lucille in New York in 1940. They married, had two children and created television’s very first sitcom, I Love Lucy. The Ricardo clan became television’s First Family. Lucille’s second baby, Desiderio IV, became Little Ricky. He was folded into the script from day one. It was Comedy Camelot. Their neighbors from downstairs, the Mertz’s, were older. They even looked like Lyndon and Lady Bird. That was in the ‘50s, just before Senator McCarthy started persecuting redheads. 

Lucille Ball had, at some point, registered to vote as a ember of the Communist Party. It was the thing to do, back in the day. Like swallowing goldfish in the 70’s and toga parties in the ‘80’s. When McCarthy got the bonfire going, suspected witches had to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Miss Ball testified that, to her knowledge, she had never belonged to the Communist Party. She played the crazy red-head and escaped getting burned alive. And she made a joke of the witch-hunting Committee. Comedy has forever been the tyrant’s true downfall.

Tyrants, as a rule, have no sense of humor. Fidel had no sense of humor. For the boys in the Sierra Maestra, the casinos were no laughing matter. Fidel closed down the American whorehouse for aesthetic reasons. It was ugly. Revolutionary aesthetics were important, comrade. The whorehouse had come to symbolize a relationship with the Colossus of the North. That had to change forever. It was about honor and dignity.

Americans don’t understand honor. In the US, honor sounds like something that holds the mafia together, which it does. But it also holds society together, in places that have that. For Americans, there is no such thing as universal dignity, either. Some people deserve respect, and other people just don’t. That’s the American way. There are rules to be followed; there are inalienable rights, for the self-righteous; and there is lots of money. But no honor and no dignity.

Rule number 1: if you are rich, you deserve it. 

Rule number 2: if you are not rich, you deserve it.

Rule number 3: be nice to rich people.

Rule number 4: rich people can get away with murder.

Along with the American rules, there is guilt, and fear, and law enforcement. There is fear of predestined final damnation, and fear of the police. If you are non-white. And there are thousands of lawsuits. Global thermonuclear lawsuits. And persecution of outsiders, brown people, homosexuals, women, Jews and Muslims. Everyone but the family dog. And, sometimes, the family dog.

Honor restored might be remembered as Fidel’s most important contribution. He managed to shake off the Monroe Doctrine and survive.

After honor, there was Cuban health care. Today, it remains, without question, the best in the hemisphere. No socialist republic, no monarchy, no capitalist paradise, has ever matched Cuban health care, comrade. Infant mortality is the lowest in the world. They prevent heart disease, cancer and diabetes. And if you get sick, they have innovative ways of treating you, and it’s all free.

They really did set up a different system. It’s cheap and it keeps people healthy, instead of making them sick to keep health care providers rich. And, another thing, there are no medical malpractice lawsuits, so good people are not afraid to practice medicine.

There are a few practical drawbacks. All Cuban dentists are trained for, and required to perform, rectal prostate exams on all their male patients over the age of forty. No matter how big their fingers are. And most guys over forty have an occasional toothache that hurts bad enough to get them in to see the dentist, (which is free).

And then, the dentist, after pushing his fat fingers up your butt, puts those same fat fingers in your mouth, comrade. Rubber gloves notwithstanding, there is an aesthetic issue there, too. It would have been better if Fidel had had all the carpenters trained to do rectal exams. The auto mechanics. The mailmen. But, comrade, the dentists?

The other failure of the Cuban revolution is what our soldier boys called Gitmo. The Guantánamo Naval Base. Fidel hated it, but he couldn’t get rid of it. Like the dentist’s fat fingers eternally stuck up his geopolitical butt. Making sure he didn’t have the Communist cancer. Which he did.

Fidel never even cashed the monthly check for $4,600 that the U.S. Treasury wrote him for the rent. Damn cheap, in fact. My one-room third floor walk-up apartment costs $1,400 a month, there is no view of the beach and my landlord can evict me anytime.

In ’62, Uncle Nikita showed up uninvited, with a big suitcase and a furry hat, to demand a place to set up his rockets. Fidel had expelled the moneychangers. He had boarded up the whorehouse, and it was looking good. Until he became a pimp. To pay the bills and feed the family. He liberated Cuba from the crotch rockets of ashamed Pennsylvanians but traded them off for medium range Soviet ballistic missiles. Deep inside national territory. Oh, yeah, don’t stop, Granma like dat. What happened to honor, comrade? ¿La Madre Revolución?

Some say Soviet rockets were forced on him.  But that’s not true. Fidel was expecting another Bay of Pigs. He wanted nuclear capability. For the US invasion, he wanted to hit back hard. You feel me, bro? Cubans didn’t call it Bay of Pigs, though. They call it the victory at Playa Girón. And it was inebriating.  

Kennedy didn’t want to invade the island. Despite having promised exactly that to a stadium full of angry Cuban exiles in Miami. But he couldn’t afford to look weak to Nikita, or soft on communism at home. But, was it worth global thermonuclear war?

The British knew that chronic guerilla warfare was something you had to expect if you were going to have an empire. It was the price you paid. Americans had trouble with that. They still believed that brown people would welcome the civilizing mission. Teach poor tropical people to eat food out of cans and wear braziers. And the bad guys had to get the hell out of Dodge.

Khrushchev thought Kennedy was weak. Then, Kennedy had to eat shit at the stadium in Miami. In ‘62, the October Crisis fell in his lap, and it changed everything. The exiles and the generals wanted to see some mushroom clouds. That didn’t happen. By ‘63, Kennedy was lying on a gurney in Parkland Hospital, his brain, most of it, splattered across Dealey Plaza. All deals were off, after that.

The Soviets were consummate chess players. That meant strategy and intimidation. A stalemate in Cuba was a tactical victory for them. The ICBM’s were already on the drawing board, and nuclear subs were becoming the hottest thing since the machine gun. In three years, Soviet missiles in Cuba would become irrelevant. You could put a nuclear sub within close range of almost any target, undetected, and fire at will. The newest subs were nuclear powered, too, so they never needed refueling.

Among bullies, image is everything. That’s why this is a story of public secrets. For posturing to work, people have to see it. If they see it and it’s top secret, then they are more impressed.