Cuban President Fidel Castro replies to President Kennedy's
naval blockade via Cuban radio and television on October 23,
1962. Kennedy enacted the blockade in response to the deployment
of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba. The small town of Bejucal, 20
miles south of Havana, looks much as it did in October 1962.
Horse carts carry passengers and fresh-cut green bananas through
narrow streets lined with pastel-colored homes. The sleepy town
doesn't seem like the kind of place to put an arsenal of nuclear
weapons. But a military bunker here was the biggest storage
depot on the island for the Soviet nuclear weapons 50 years ago.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had secretly put dozens of
intermediate and short-range nuclear-armed missiles on the
island, disguising some of the rockets as palm trees. On the
morning of October 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy was first
told the Soviet Union had installed nuclear weapons in Cuba, and
the tense 13 days that followed brought the world as close as
it's ever been to nucl