Cuban Missile Crisis Protest

This peace march was held on October 24, 1962 in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Two days earlier President John Kennedy had announced the discovery of Soviet missiles on the island of Cuba, some 90 miles south of Florida.  Kennedy also announced a naval blockade of the island nation in order to prevent further Soviet shipments.

Recently declassified U.S. government and international documents suggest that Cuban and Soviet leaders had expected the U.S. to invade Cuba and launch a nuclear strike at the Soviet Union in 1962.  The Bay of Pigs fiasco and covert operations in Cuba led Fidel Castro and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to believe that a U.S. invasion of Cuba was imminent.  Moreover, President Kennedy ordered the largest peacetime expansion of the U.S. military and approved a nuclear first-strike against the U.S.S.R.  Historian Philip Brenner suggests that the decision to place nuclear warheads in Cuba was a defensive strategy and induced by fear of U.S. military growth.

For several days, the nations were locked in a Cold War standoff with the most dire of consequences facing them—nuclear war.  The demonstrators here urged President Kennedy to take a conciliatory approach to the Soviet Union and to steer the nation away from any nuclear confrontation.  According to Brenner, “Khrushchev, like Kennedy, perceived the crisis as spiraling out of control.”  Khrushchev feared that one of his Soviet commanders in Cuba would purposely or accidentally fire a nuclear warhead and start a nuclear war.  Kennedy’s promise to remove U.S. missiles in Turkey and Khrushchev’s humility brought the crisis to an end on October 28.

Further Reading:
The Oregon Journal, October 23-30, 1962

The Oregonian, October, 23-30, 1962

Written by Trudy Flores, Sarah Griffith, © Oregon Historical Society, 2002.