Did Cuba Actually Have Bombs During the Missile Crisis

In a matter of a few days, the world was within a few moments of wide-scaled atomic bombings. Known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, US had received surveillance that the Soviet Union had began storing nuclear missiles in the country of Cuba which is only 90 miles from the coast of Florida. Once the US received the photos of the missiles from their U-2 spy plane, the US wanted to invade Cuba to remove the missiles but fortunately decided not to. John F. Kennedy ended up striking a deal with the Soviets that if they removed the missiles from Cuba, the US would not invade Cuba. The US also secretly removed there nuclear missiles from the country of Turkey.

The ordeal is considered the closest occurrence in which the Cold War would turn hot. Although tensions were tight before the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is not really other instances in which the US and the Soviet Union almost engage in war. According to a writer for the website The Spectator, Alistair Horne, when she was on a trip to Cuba from the United Kingdom in 2002 she passed a site of the missiles and when she inquired about them to her tour guide, he responded “No, there were never any rockets here. You see, what our clever campesinos (farmers) did was to strip palm trees and paint them silver — to fool the yanqui (yankee) gringos”. 

Photo Taken by U-2 Spy Plane

Could the world have engaged in atomic warfare over palm trees? This seems unlikely, but this theory could be true to a degree. Maybe the Soviets used this tactic as a test to see how the Americans would react to a threat at their backdoor or to make the Americans think they have more atomic weapons than they actually do. After all, The US never set foot in Cuba to confirm if the pictures taken from their U-2 plane in 1962 were factual and they made a deal to not invade Cuba and even ended up removing their missiles from Turkey.

-Michael Brown