Servando González -- The "Lessons" of the Cuban Missile Crisis

In his well known novel, 1984, George Orwell wrote that he who controls the past controls the present, and he who controls the present controls the future. Seen from Orwell's perspective, two apparently unconnected events, President Bush's efforts to start a long, profitable war against Iraq, and a meeting in Havana about the Cuban missile crisis, show a most surprising connection.

Most of the recent books written about the Cuban missile crisis, based on the conclusions arrived at the previous meetings, as well as the books they have generated, seem to be just variations of a single voice: the Cuban missile crisis was the closest we came to nuclear Armageddon. The only thing that seems to change from meeting to meeting and from one book to the next, is the alleged number of missiles and nuclear warheads on Cuban soil. Like rabbits jumping out of a magician's hat, the missiles and the nuclear warheads keep multiplying. The meeting that just took place in Havana is no exception: according to the liars and disinformers, we were closer to the brink than we ever suspected.

Some of the participants, like Robert MacNamara and Ted Sorensen, have invoked the "lessons" of the Cuban missile crisis in a way that subtly justifies Mr. Bush's intentions to invade Iraq. Even President Bush himself has mentioned Kennedy's decisiveness and will during the crisis: only a strong response can deter an evil enemy. The problem with this line of reasoning is that most of what has been written and said about the Cuban missile crisis is not true.

Far from being so close to the brink, as this international group of professional liars and disinformers is trying to make us believe, the Cuban missile crisis was a totally manufactured pseudo-event whose main goal was to terrorize the American public and justify the Cold War. It is not by chance that the same people who made billions with the Cold War -- which was mostly a propaganda product -- are the same ones who control the non-profit foundations that are bankrolling most of the research whose main goal is to prove "how close to the brink" we were during the Cuban missile crisis. The reason for this is very simple: to these people our fear translates into their profit. The credibility of their plans would be lessened if one day the people discover that the previous fears were unfounded.

After having studied in detail the event known as the Cuban missile crisis I have arrived at the conclusion that the only lesson we can derive from it is that there are no lessons at all. And there are no lessons from the Cuban missile crisis for the same reasons that there are no great historical lessons. The only lesson, if any, we can derive from the Cuban missile crisis, is that governments always lie to their people.

Servando González is the author of The Secret Fidel Castro: Deconstructing the Symbol. His new book, The Nuclear Deception: Nikita Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis will appear the 22nd of October, the day President Kennedy lied to the American people when he announced the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The book is the "Pelican Brief" of the event we call the Cuban missile crisis. González was an officer in the Cuban army during the crisis.