Cuban Missile Crisis at 60: Cuban dictator twice called on Soviet Union to launch pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the United States

Fidel Castro requested a nuclear first strike on the United States twice.

Fidel Castro on at least two occasions called on the Soviet Union to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the United States and plunge the world into thermonuclear war. The first time was during the October 1962 Missile Crisis in a letter to Nikita Khrushchev and the second time in the early 1980s when Fidel Castro again pressed the Soviets hard for a nuclear strike against the United States.

Following the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis  Ernesto "Che" Guevara denounced the outcome. [UNESCO that claims to work to "prevent violent extremism through education and media literacy" and education for peace is promoting the writings of Ernesto "Che" Guevara ]. Che was disappointed that the 1962 Missile Crisis was resolved peacefully.

"Here is the electrifying example of a people prepared to suffer nuclear immolation so that its ashes may serve as a foundation for new societies. When an agreement was reached by which the atomic missiles were removed, without asking our people, we were not relieved or thankful for the truce; instead we denounced the move with our own voice."

The Castro regime's second request for preemptive nuclear war became public knowledge on September 21, 2009 and the newspaper of record The New York Times quoted the source:

Andrian A. Danilevich, a Soviet general staff officer from 1964 to ’90 and director of the staff officers who wrote the Soviet Union’s final reference guide on strategic and nuclear planning is quoted in the early 1980s, saying that Mr. Castro “pressed hard for a tougher Soviet line against the U.S. up to and including possible nuclear strikes.” The general staff, General Danilevich continued, “had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S.”

In 1962 when the Russians refused to go along with the Castro regime's call for nuclear war the Cuban dictatorship responded by contracting Nazis. Fidel Castro personally recruited former Nazi SS Waffen members to train Cuban troops in 1962 and that he also reached out to Otto Ernst Remer and Ernst-Wilhelm Springer, in Germany's extreme right to purchase weapons. 

Bodo Hechelhammer, historical investigations director at the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND)—the German foreign-intelligence agency, in an interview with German newspaper Die Welt said: “Evidently, the Cuban revolutionary army did not fear contagion from personal links to Nazism, so long as it served their own objectives.”

This is the first in a series of reflections on the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

On this day in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis began when the US discovered nuclear missiles placed by the Soviet Union in Cuba. Learn how Fidel Castro acted as a spoiler sabotaging peace efforts, pushing for nuclear war during the greatest nuclear crisis the world has ever known. https://t.co/xduF88eyI0

— Center for a Free Cuba (@cubacenter) October 13, 2022