Poster in honor of Fidel Castro's first visit to the USSR. Photo: E. Artsrunyan
Khrushchev Eager to Mend Relations with His Favorite Revolutionary after the Cuban Missile Crisis
Castro Toured Soviet Union for almost 40 Days in 1963; Visited Uzbekistan, Georgia and Ukraine
Castro-Khrushchev Conversations and Khrushchev’s Report to the Presidium Published for First Time
Washington, D.C., April 29, 2024 - New evidence from Russian archival sources and published today by the National Security Archive details Fidel Castro’s extraordinary April-May 1963 trip to the USSR, which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev saw as an opportunity to mend relations that had soured after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The newly translated records from Russian state archives depict the Cuban leader touring several Soviet republics, meeting and conversing with top Soviet leaders, and, most importantly, receiving numerous reassurances that the Soviet Union would remain Cuba’s reliable partner and patron, despite how the Cuban Missile Crisis concluded, as well as promises of security and economic assistance.[1]
Fidel Castro would say, in a secret, night-long 1968 speech to his top leadership, that he felt humiliated by what he saw as a Soviet betrayal when Khrushchev negotiated with the Americans behind his back on the withdrawal of the missiles that were the central focus of the Cuban Missile Crisis.[2] Castro was never fully informed about the conditions of the deal, especially the related removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy. At the same time, Castro knew that Cuba needed Soviet aid for his reform measures, both in material terms and in terms of ideological education.
For their part, Khrushchev and the top Soviet leadership were willing to go to great lengths to keep their very important ally, the only successful communist revolution in the Western hemisphere. In addition to all the strategic reasons, Khrushchev had real grounds to fear a domestic political backlash for “losing Cuba” if that happened. During his November 1962 stay in Cuba, Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan was taking away Soviet weapons with one hand, while with the other he was trying to give Castro every possible promise of economic aid. (see EBB 400)
Then, almost three months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Premier wrote Castro a heartfelt letter explaining his motivation both for deploying the missiles and for withdrawing them in speedy fashion. He was, essentially, apologizing but also trying to take practical steps to bring Castro back into the Soviet fold. Khrushchev invited Castro to come on an extensive visit where he would see different parts of the USSR and spend time with the Soviet leadership. (see Nikita Khrushchev's letter to Fidel Castro)
On April 27, 1963, Castro secretly arrived on a nonstop flight from Havana to Murmansk (landing on the third try in a very bad weather). He was greeted like a hero, with thousands of people out on the streets. Mikoyan and the Commander of the Northern Fleet. Admiral Kasatonov. were his hosts, and Nikolay Leonov translated for Castro throughout the trip (Document 1). Castro was taken to Severodvinsk to see Soviet submarines (but was not shown the ones that went to Cuba during the crisis), met with sailors, and was given a reception on the nuclear icebreaker Lenin. (see the excellent posting about the reception in Murmansk on the site of the Murmansk Oblast State Archive)
After Murmansk, Castro left for Moscow where he participated in May Day celebrations with the entire Soviet leadership on top of Lenin’s Mausoleum and stayed at the state dacha in Zavidovo. At Zavidovo, the two leaders began to discuss the fate of communism in the world and especially in developing countries. Khrushchev spoke as the teacher, while Castro played the part of a dedicated student who also had his own views and often questioned the teacher.
Castro was especially concerned about the situation with the liberation struggle in Africa; he asked Khrushchev “to express his opinion regarding the future political development of the African continent, noting along the way that he himself was very critical about the prospect of fast political progress in a number of African states.” Castro was planning to visit Algeria on an invitation from the revolutionary leader Ben Bella, but Khrushchev dissuaded him, saying that it would be too easy for imperialists to assassinate Castro during a stop there (Document 2). The Soviet leader gave his honest views about the complicated prospects of communist victories among the African countries, calling the leader of Guinea, Secou Toure, a “prostitute.” The discussion contrasts the two leaders’ manner of thinking about global issues: Castro’s apparently sincere belief that Marxism-Leninism will ultimately prevail and Khrushchev’s much more practical, and sometimes cynical, views, especially his assessments of individual leaders.
Among their many conversations, for Khrushchev the most important subject was to explain to Castro the Soviet motivation for both deploying and removing massive Soviet forces, including nuclear weapons, from the island in the fall of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev’s main goal during Castro’s visit was to soothe any hurt feelings the Cuban leader might have from the episode and to persuade Castro that the security of the Cuban revolution was guaranteed by the USSR as a result of the “victory” they had achieved in extracting from the U.S. a pledge to not intervene in Cuba. These conversations are not included here because, at the time of this posting, they have not yet been declassified by the Russian archival authorities. However, we know that the talks took place and a lot about their substance from Khrushchev’s report to the Presidium on June 7 (Document 7) and from Castro’s recollections at a critical oral history conference organized in 1992 on the 30th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis by the National Security Archive and James Blight and janet Lang of Brown University, which the editor of this EBB participated in. (Document 8).
On May 4, 1963, Khrushchev showed Castro documents from the “confidential channel” on Soviet interactions with the United States during and after the crisis. Khrushchev read the documents to the Cuban leader with simultaneous translation by NikolayLeonov, the Soviet resident in Mexico, who often translated for Castro and accompanied him on trips to the USSR. (Document 3) The readings and the discussion of the top secret documents took all day, during which Castro learned for the first time, apparently inadvertently, that Soviet missiles in Cuba had been removed in exchange for the removal of U.S. missiles in Turkey and Italy. Castro realized that “it was the last thing that Nikita wanted me to hear. […] Withdrawing missiles from Turkey had nothing to do with the defense of Cuba.” Castro asked Khrushchev to read that paragraph again, but the Soviet leader just laughed “that mischievous laugh of his.” (Document 8)
After meetings in Moscow, Castro went on a long tour of the Soviet Union. In Volgograd, he visited a tractor plant and the Soviet war memorial on Mamaev Hill. His trip to Uzbekistan was important from the point of view of agricultural reform—he met with tractor drivers, saw silk production, and was impressed that an underdeveloped country had made so much progress and had mechanized agriculture. That was the idea—Cuba could also develop quickly with Soviet assistance and tutelage. After Tashkent, Castro traveled to Irkutsk, fished with a local fisherman on Angara and saw Bratsk hydroelectric power station. In every city, at every train station, he was met with enthusiastic local people who genuinely admired the Cuban revolutionary leader. Another stop in Siberia was in Sverdlovsk (presently Yekaterinburg). From Sverdlovsk, the honored guest flew to Leningrad and then to Kiev.
Back in Moscow, Khrushchev offered Castro the chance to see an ICBM, and the Cuban leader even signed his name on the body of the R-16 missile (so the American imperialists would know that it was a greeting from Cuba if it ever had to be used). On May 23, a number of Cuban-Soviet agreements were signed in the Kremlin, and Castro was honored as a Hero of the Soviet Union. After a grand event at Luzhniki stadium in Moscow (125,000 people attended), Khrushchev and Castro flew to Khrushchev’s favorite southern dacha in Pitsunda, near Sukhumi.
Traveling around Georgia, the two continued talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis (transcript not declassified yet, but Sergey Khrushchev mentions an argument between Khrushchev and Castro regarding how many days the Cuban revolution could have resisted an American invasion had the Soviets not negotiated with Kennedy[3]), the Cuban economy (Document 6), the situation in the socialist bloc (Romanians still possessed bourgeois nationalist sentiments and did not want to cooperate with other socialist countries) (Document 5), and Soviet specialists in Cuba (many of them are pure bureaucrats and have to be sent home) (Document 4). Castro was exposed to a full curriculum of socialist education and gained some invaluable insights into how things really worked.
Castro left for Havana the same way he came—through Murmansk, and also in secret. During the entire trip he was feted as a hero, awarded the highest military honors of the USSR, and received pledges (and concrete agreements) of economic assistance in all spheres of Cuban industry and agriculture. It was truly a victory tour.
Khrushchev, however, still had a job to do—to persuade the Presidium that Castro had accepted the Soviet narrative of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Castro’s subsequent secret speech to the Cuban top leadership in 1968 shows that he had not) and that he remained a loyal and reliable ally and an eager student who saw the Soviet Union, and not China, as his main teacher. Khrushchev’s report to the Presidium shows that China was a major concern of the Soviets in 1963 as well as during the Missile Crisis. Khrushchev assured the Presidium that he had explained the China issue to Castro and that he “understood our position correctly.” In doing so, it seemed that the Soviet leader was trying to persuade the Presidium—as he said he had persuaded Castro—that the Soviet withdrawal from Cuba was a victory and not a fiasco, repeating, in various forms: “we have achieved our goal, therefore, we won, we are the winners.”
Document 1
State Archive of the Russian Federation, Fond R 5446, Opis 120, delo 1811
The reception for Castro took place on the nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin, the first nuclear icebreaker in the world. Kasatonov welcomes the leader of the Cuban revolution with military honors. He reminds the Cuban delegation that last fall, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Army and Navy were brought to “the highest state of combat readiness” and “filled with determination, by order of our Government, by the command of military duty, by the call of friendship, to come to your aid.” In his response, Castro raises a toast to the Soviet Navy and shares his impressions: “we were able to witness the power of modern Soviet military technology, the strong discipline, and the high moral spirit of Soviet sailors.”
Document 2
Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), Fond 52, Opis 1
[donated to the National Security Archive by Dr. James Hershberg]
Khrushchev meets with Castro in his residence Zavidovo near Moscow. Castro consults with Khrushchev about his decision to visit Algeria after leaving the USSR on the invitation of Ben Bella, the head of the revolutionary government there. Khrushchev asks Castro not to go, citing security threats, and succeeds in persuading him to cancel the visit. They discuss the revolutionary situation in Africa and its prospects. Khrushchev laments that “the liberation of the African countries that was happening rapidly during the last several years did not always produce the desired results” (meaning that they did not all choose the socialist path) but that the USSR will keep providing them with generous economic aid while not interfering in their affairs. In his opinion, the African revolutionaries still have a long way to go and have to struggle against the development of Black bourgeoisie and “against political prostitutes like Sekou Toure [of Guinea].” Castro tells Khrushchev about the Indonesian communist leader Sukarno’s visit to Cuba, whom he regards very negatively. Khrushchev agrees with his assessment of Sukarno as “a womanizer and an actor,” but says that the Soviets had no choice: “we support and will support Sukarno as a political leader mainly because currently in Indonesia there is no one who could seriously implement the general course taken by Sukarno or to implement a more radical revolutionary policy.”
Document 3
Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), Fond 52, Opis 1
[donated to the National Security Archive by Dr. James Hershberg]
During another meeting in Zavidovo, Khrushchev offers Castro an opportunity “to look through the latest documents that the Soviet and American sides had exchanged through confidential channels on various issues, including the Cuban issue. Transcripts and cables are read to Castro in translation, likely by Nikolai Leonov. The documents include the memoranda of conversations between Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin and U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, as well as the Khrushchev memo to the Presidium on Cuba.
Document 4
Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), Fond 52, Opis 1
[donated to the National Security Archive by Dr. James Hershberg]
In this short conversation in the car on the way to observe some military exercises, Castro and Khrushchev discuss problems with Soviet advisors in Cuba. Khrushchev complains that some Soviet agencies send bureaucrats to Cuba who do not understand the Cuban specifics and only spend time in the offices that the Cuban government provides them. He asks Castro why they provide them offices with “telephones when none of them can speak Spanish.” The Soviet leader believes that Castro “should examine the lists of those advisers, concretely, name by name, and keep only those of them, who actually provide [Cuba] real practical help. All the rest of them should be recalled back home and the earlier the better.”
Document 5
Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), Fond 52, Opis 1
[donated to the National Security Archive by Dr. James Hershberg]
This conversation takes place at the government summer residence in Pitsunda on the Black Sea. The Cuban leader wants to discuss some tensions within the socialist camp, in particular with the Romanian communists. Khrushchev harshly criticizes the “narrowly nationalist, limited character of the Romanian comrades” for their intransigence on the issue of the socialist division of labor and unwillingness to participate in a joint project with Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the GDR to build a cascade of hydroelectric power stations on the Danube. Along the way, the Soviet leader lectures Castro on the socialist political economy and the internal dynamics of the alliance. In the end, he concludes that “disagreements of this kind are immediately used by the Chinese and the Albanians, who try to patch together some sort of a coalition” with the purpose of splitting the socialist camp.
Document 6
Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), Fond 52, Opis 1
[donated to the National Security Archive by Dr. James Hershberg]
This long conversation is devoted to a discussion of Soviet assistance to Cuban agricultural reform measures. It starts with a discussion of the Cuban request (Khrushchev promises to grant it in full in 1963) that the USSR provide machinery for loading cut sugar cane on the trucks. Castro laments that the manual nature of growing and harvesting sugar cane is the Cuban “eternal curse.” Khrushchev immediately offers his ideas to create a completely new sugar cane combine that would both cut and gather the sugar cane and thus free up thousands of workers. The two leaders discuss numerous issues related to agricultural reform, mechanization, and the preparation of agricultural specialists. All Cuban requests are granted, and even more is offered. Khrushchev is clearly trying to tie the Cuban leader even closer to the USSR after the cold spell in their relations after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Document 7
Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), published in A.A. Fursenko, ed. Presidium of TsK KPSS, 1954-1964, Vol 1 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003) pp. 720-726
This stenographic record of Khrushchev’s report to the Presidium preserves all of the colloquial expressions and the often-confusing style of Khrushchev’s unedited speech. His goal is to show to his communist colleagues that he was able to heal the split with Fidel that emerged as a result of the Soviet withdrawal of the missiles without consulting or even informing the Cubans in October and November 1962. He explains that he persuaded Fidel that the removal of the weapons was in the interest of the Cuban revolution, which he said would be at peace for up to six years while the Democrats remain in power in the United States. He presents the USSR and Cuba as the “winners” in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the United States as the “losers.” The Soviet leader also dismisses accusations that the Soviets were “cowards” during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This report provides glimpses of the conversations on security issues and the “Chinese factor” in Soviet-Cuban relations. According to Khrushchev, the issue between the Soviets and the Chinese is “nationalism, egotism”—the fact that the Chinese “want to play the first fiddle.” Khrushchev assures Castro that the Soviet Union would remain their main patron providing security assistance. However, he refuses to sign a “military treaty” saying that if he did Cuba would be seen as a Soviet satellite.
In his report, Khrushchev emphasizes several times that Castro was “very happy,” that he understood the Soviet positions, and that he agreed with the Soviet reasoning.
The rest of the report deals with the issue of Soviet economic assistance to Cuba and provides details about Castro’s travels around the Soviet Union.
Document 8
Broadcast on Cuban Television on February 28, 1992, translated and published by the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service.
At the 30th anniversary conference in Havana, on January 11, 1992, Fidel Castro spent several hours recounting his experience during and after the missile crisis—providing his own postmortem as the last surviving leader of that historic and dangerous conflict. The CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which collected and translated foreign broadcasts, published an English version of his remarks after they were aired on Cuban television at the end of February 1992.
Conference participants included leading Kennedy administration officials such as former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and key Soviet officials such as the planner of the missile deployment, Gen. Anatoly Gribkov. To this highly knowledgeable audience, Castro reflected on what he called Kennedy’s “courage” to resist the pressures from his military to attack Cuba and acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of lives would have been lost if the U.S. had invaded. He also recalled the bitter sense of betrayal when Khrushchev announced the withdrawal of the missiles without consulting Cuba. Instead of relief that the threat of an imminent U.S. invasion and nuclear war had receded, the Cubans, Castro stated, felt “a great indignation because we realized we had become some type of game token.”
At the time, Castro did not know of the secret Kennedy-Khrushchev deal to resolve the crisis by swapping U.S. missiles in Turkey and Italy for the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Towards the end of this lengthy retrospective, Castro recalled his bumpy flight to Murmansk in 1963 and recounted that, during their meetings at the Zavidovo dacha, Khrushchev inadvertently read him a document that revealed the secret swap, confirming Fidel’s belief that Cuba had been “used as an exchange token.” “Withdrawing missiles from Turkey had nothing to do with the defense of Cuba,” he remembered thinking about the Soviet rationale for installing their missiles on the island. “Cuba was defended by saying: Please remove the naval base; please, stop the embargo and the pirate [exile] attacks.” He remembered asking Khrushchev to “read that part about the missiles in Turkey” again. “He laughed that mischievous laugh of his. He laughed, and that was it. I was sure they were not going to repeat it again, because it was like that old phrase about bringing up the issue of the noose in the home of a man who was hung.”
The Soviet documents published above do not include this exchange between Castro and Khrushchev, perhaps because the translator, Nikolai Leonov, was instructed not to take notes on the documents being read out loud by Khrushchev. Leonov’s memo from the meeting on May 4 at Zavidovo is only one page and mentions reading “transcripts and cables exchanged through confidential channels” with the Americans but none of the substance (see Document 3 above).
[1] The National Security Archive thanks Dr. James Hershberg for donating the copies of Castro-Khrushchev conversations that he obtained from RGANI.
[2] James Blight, Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis, (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007)
[3] Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (Penn State University Press, 2000).