Castro blames Khrushchev over missile crisis

Cuba’s President Fidel Castro has said on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev helped create the conflict by misleading US president John F Kennedy – indicating that there were no nuclear weapons on the communist island.

Castro’s comments, which came in an interview with ABC’s ”20/20” programme, coincided with a conference in Havana bringing together Cubans and Americans who played roles during the real life Cold War drama. ABC, which will broadcast the interview tomorrow, made the transcript public yesterday.

“He believed what Khrushchev told him,” Castro said during the interview, conducted this week in Havana. ”Therefore, Kennedy was misled. That was a very big mistake on the part of Khrushchev ... one that we opposed vehemently.”

The transcript is not clear on how lying to Kennedy contributed to the crisis, but it implies that being misled made the American president more distrustful of the Soviet premier.

Documents from that period show that Khrushchev continued to insist to American officials in mid-October 1962 that all Soviet activity in Cuba was defensive – even after US officials had spy plane photographs showing that on the island there were Soviet surface-to-surface missiles with a range of approximately 600 to 1,500 miles.

The discovery of the Soviet nuclear warheads just 90 miles south of Florida brought the world to the edge of nuclear conflict.

As US president George Bush musters support to oust Saddam Hussein, former members of the Kennedy administration are heading to the Cuba conference to revisit that earlier standoff.

Former defence secretary Robert McNamara and former special aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr were among those expected at the conference, aimed at showing a lesser known view of the crisis: Cuba’s. Castro is also expected.

In his ABC interview with Barbara Walters, Castro said his country did not agree to accept the missiles out of fear, and “we would have rather not had them in order to preserve the prestige” of Cuba.

He also said officials on the communist-run island did not like being considered “the Soviet base in the Caribbean”.

Still, Castro indicated respect for Khrushchev and his support of the Cuban revolution.

“Even though Nikita was a bold man, he was a courageous man ... and I can make criticisms of him ... of the mistakes he made. I have reflected a lot on that,” Castro said. But misleading Kennedy, the Cuban president said, ”was his main ... flaw”.

The crisis, marking the Cold War’s tensest moments, was defused when Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba.