Free The Longest Romance by Humberto Fontova Page A

a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy. You, of course, realize where that would have led. It would have been the start of a thermonuclear war. Dear comrade Fidel Castro I consider this proposal of yours incorrect.” 3
    Did Stanley Kubrick realize he had directed a documentary entitled Dr. Strangelove rather than a fiction? He simply got a few scenes wrong. The real-life General Ripper and Major T. J. Kong were both in Havana, not at Burleson Air Force Base or Washington, D.C.
    The Discovery Channel somehow “omitted” the most dramatic scene from the entire crisis, just as they omit the daily sanguinary drama of the half-century-long “Shark Week” in the Florida Straits. There was no hint in the Discovery Channel special of Fidel Castro’s
raging lust to fire the missiles preemptively against the nation in which the Discovery Channel dwells.
    Castro’s image as the plucky David surviving decades of bullying and brutalization by the Yankee Goliath also emerged intact from the Discovery Channel program. There was no mention whatever of Khrushchev’s snickering with satisfaction about the Missile Crisis resolution. “We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along,” he wrote in his memoir. “Security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro.”
    So far from defying a superpower, Fidel Castro has poked along lo these many years by hiding behind the skirts of the U.S., the U.S.S.R. and the British Empire. After the Missile Crisis resolution, Castro’s defiance of the U.S. took the form of protection by the U.S. Coast Guard and also by the British Navy, shielding Castro from attacks by his Cuban-exile enemies in the U.S. and the Bahamas.
    So sacrosanct was the U.S. pledge to protect Castro that it even stayed Ronald Reagan’s hand. When Professor Antonio De La Cova asked Elliott Abrams, assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs under Regan, about the possibility of arming some Cuban contras in the manner of Nicaragua’s, Abrams replied: “You can’t do that because of the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement. We never got there, at least not in the period that I was involved with it. We never got to contemplating any serious action in Cuba which could be considered a violation of the agreement.” 4
    Castro, on the other hand, was again itching to get his fingers on the button. A Pentagon study declassified in 2009, entitled “Soviet Intentions 1965-1985,” based on extensive interviews with former Soviet officials, shows that Castro’s urge to toast Manhattan flared again during the Reagan administration.
    During the early 1890’s—according to a former chief of the Soviet general staff, General Adrian Danilevich—“Mr. Castro
pressed hard for a tougher Soviet line against the U.S. up to and including nuclear strikes. We had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S.”
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    NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PARTNERS WITH CASTRO
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    National Geographic’s partnership with Castro’s propaganda ministry started with a January 1977 article—really an infomercial for Castroism—called “Inside Cuba Today.” The article featured an interview with Fidel Castro and proclaimed that “over half of Cubans’ lives had been improved by the Revolution.” The magazine’s pro-Castro coverage continued in 1991 with “Cuba at a Crossroads” by Peter White, and then in 2000 with “Cuba’s Reefs, A Last Caribbean Refuge” by none other than Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws.
    â€œCuba Naturally,” a National Geographic feature presenting Cuba as a paradise of ecosystems, followed in 2003. Then in 2006 came