Cuba: To the Brink

CHAPTER 6 · 1962 · The Cold War, 1945–1991

Cuba was the Western hemisphere’s safest assumption — a US-aligned island of casinos and sugar — until Castro’s rebels took Havana in January 1959 and Washington’s hostility (embargo, sabotage, the CIA’s farcical exile landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 — find the marker) pushed the revolution the rest of the way to Moscow. Watch the island flip to tan in 1962: the Monroe Doctrine’s two-century moat is breached. Khrushchev then reaches for a shortcut to fix his real problem — a 10-to-1 American lead in strategic missiles and US Jupiters newly emplaced in Turkey — by secretly shipping med

The turn: 27 October, aboard B-59 — one man’s no.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.