Right on, Larry C., that is the crux of the matter. Well said!

Doug R. - I understand your point about the missiles. I hadn't forgotten about it, I just didn't want to go on and on forever (I can hear some people laughing when I say that! I do go on and on when I get impassioned about something...).

Anyway, I'm not surprised the USA reacted badly to the deployment of those missiles. If I had been Castro I would not have allowed nuclear weapons to come in from Russia in the first place...it's too dangerous. A small country is much better off not to make itself a nuclear target. One thing about Castro though...the man is not afraid of anything...if you read some biographies of his life (both supportive and critical ones) that becomes very evident. In his first armed attack on the Batista regime he led a ragtag force of less than 200 amateurs against a military fortress with more than 1000 trained soldiers. That was the famous 26th of July attack, which is like Cuba's 4rth of July, and it had virtually no chance of succeeding. It was bloodily defeated, but Fidel lived to fight another day. He lost the battle, but won the war, because he won the hearts of his people.

I suspect that the Russians made a deal with him on the missiles...you get this much aid if we can station missiles in Cuba, and if we can't, too bad. In this way the Russians were enabled to have missiles right close to the USA which for them was to achieve some measure of parity, as the USA had plenty of missiles right close to their borders. It was all to Russia's advantage, not Cuba's. That's big power politics, and it's a pretty sad business, especially for the 3rd World. Kennedy was a guy who didn't back down either, so the stakes were high...too high for comfort. We can all be glad that cooler heads prevailed.

By the way, Kennedy tried repeatedly to have Castro assassinated by mafia hitmen, Cuban exiles, and CIA operatives...and it is QUITE possible that Castro retaliated by hiring his own mafia hitmen (and other individuals) to kill Kennedy. The mafia had strong reasons of their own to kill both Kennedy and Castro. I doubt, however, that we will ever know for sure about that one. All we can do is speculate.