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MERICAN, Russian and Cuban scientists, diplomats, politicians and academics, including Cuban president Fidel Castro, came together this month in Cuba for a conference at which they looked back at one of the most terrifying moments in international affairs — the Cuban missile crisis. Forty years ago, in October 1962, it appeared that a third World War was inevitable — this time to be fought with nuclear weapons.

This followed the American government’s discovery on October 14, 1962 of the presence of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba.

The Soviets, it turned out, had decided to place medium- (MRBM) and intermediate-range ballistic (IRBM) missiles and other weapons in Cuba. Forty-two MRBMs (300-1,200 miles) and 24 IRBMs (1,200-3,500 miles) were sent to the Caribbean island, along with 22,000 Soviet soldiers and technicians.

On October 22, 1962, US president John F Kennedy declared that Cuba was under quarantine to prevent further missile development there, while threatening further action if the Soviets did not dismantle their installations already in place.

After a week of behind-the-scenes negotiations, during which the parties nevertheless started to prepare for war, Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev announced, on October 28, that the construction of the missile sites had stopped.

The missiles were withdrawn by November 20 as part of an agreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Kennedy also pledged, as part of the deal, that the US would never invade Cuba. (Post Bay of Pigs)

Here in Jamaica, only 90 miles removed from Cuba, the government of Prime Minister Sir Alexander Bustamante responded by pledging solidarity with the Americans and the West.

After a special Cabinet meeting on October 24 to consider the matter, the government issued a statement in which it endorsed the American actions.

Jamaica, the statement said, was “against the build-up of offensive weapons, which constitute a threat to peace and endorses the steps that have been announced by the USA, which seek to put an end to this threat. It is fervently hoped that through the United Nations this delicate problem will be resolved and we will assist through this agency”.

Prime Minister Bustamante, at a public meeting in Spanish Town, declared simply, “I am not with Russia. I am with the West and the United States”, to prolonged applause.

Edward Seaga, the then minister of development and welfare, at a UN Day ceremony at George VI Memorial Park (now National Heroes Park), on October 24, declared the Jamaican government’s strongly-held position against the Communist world.

Jamaica, he said, had “grown up in the British Commonwealth, but apart from that position and relationship, we are connected with other countries, especially the United States of America”.

He noted that the events of that week “have thrown us up from the fringe of an international area of problem to a more central position within an international area of deeper problem”.

Jamaican flight schedules were affected during that momentous week as well, following a notice by the Cuban military authorities that all flights over Cuban territory and over Cuban territorial waters were prohibited. Flights between Jamaica and Nassau, Miami and New York therefore had to be rerouted, thereby lasting considerably longer, some as much as an hour-and-a-half.

Governor-General Sir Kenneth Blackbourne, in his UN Day address, issued a call for peace, saying “peace-loving and kindly Jamaica finds herself, through no fault of her own, in the frontline of a world crisis”.

The Anglican Lord Bishop of Jamaica, Rt Rev Percival Gibson, made a special appeal for prayers for peace to be offered in churches throughout the island.

But the responses to the Cuban missile crisis were not all passive, neither were they homogenous. A group of demonstrators bearing placards took their protest in support of the Cuban revolution outside the US Embassy on Duke Street in Kingston.

The fact that there was this demonstration of solidarity with the Cubans in Jamaica during the crisis does not surprise Professor Rupert Lewis of the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

“Remember that’s the period in which Claudius Henry’s movement was active — Claudius Henry’s son, Ronald Henry, came back to Jamaica, having had contacts with Castro and a number of people on the left and the Rastafarians would also have taken public stands against the Kennedy position,” Lewis told the Sunday Observer.

But while the general response to the crisis in Jamaica was fairly muted, Professor Gerald Lalor, director-general at the International Centre for Environmental and Nuclear Sciences at UWI, Mona, is in no doubt as to the serious consequences that would have befallen Jamaica and the world had it escalated into an exchange of nuclear firepower.

“If the war had started, there is no doubt that there would have been a full exchange between the US and the Soviets and it could also have included the other nuclear powers,” Lalor said. “The consequences would, therefore, have been grim. We would have virtually gone back to the Stone Age.”

Asked about the impact on Jamaica of a direct nuclear strike on Cuba, Lalor said this would have depended in part on the type of bomb and the atmospheric conditions at the time. At a minimum, he said “it certainly would have given great difficulties from the central mountain range down to the North Coast — high radiation would have been inevitable”.

Furthermore, he said, the exposure to radiation would have lasted months “as the elements came back down from the atmosphere and if there were heavy rains there would have been a great deal of radioactive isotopes falling into the soil”.

Beyond the immediate impact, Lalor said the lingering effect “would have gone on for years with genetic disorders giving rise to so-called ‘monster babies’, thyroid cancers and many other problems”.

As for Jamaica’s lucrative North Coast tourism trade, he said this would have been wiped out entirely.

Looking back at that week of unprecedented crisis, Opposition Leader Edward Seaga told the Sunday Observer that he was relieved that it was handled “properly and delicately”.

That was an important instance, he said, in which “there was no trigger-happy response, having regard to the outcome that any other action might have sparked. Diplomacy eventually was the mode of dialogue used rather than aggression and it paid off”.

The circumstances, Seaga said, dictated the course of diplomacy. “Sometimes that is the course that you take, sometimes a different type of action is required.”

While that momentous week — October 22 to 28 — was one of high tension for the world and held untold dangers for Jamaica, it was, by many accounts, quite normal times in Jamaica in many respects.

On the political front, Senator Hugh Shearer, Leader of Government Business in the Upper House, was accusing the Opposition People’s National Party of setting up a spy network in the government system, a charge strongly denied by Opposition Leader Norman Manley who threatened to take legal action in response.

Manley himself was calling for a probe into the Woolens Industry affair, while the JLP, in a print ad announcing a political meeting in Half-Way-Tree, gave as the subject of the meeting: ‘Scandals of the PNP government and achievements of the JLP government’.

“You can’t get any more normal than that in Jamaica,” chuckled one noted political analyst.