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A Sports Dispute Started the Cuban Missile Crisis and Other Odd Facts

Khalid Elhassan October 28, 2019 31 min

Nixon with Kissinger and his deputy, Alexander Haig. Vanity Fair

38. “Cubans Play Baseball. Russians Play Soccer”

The Cold War superpowers came eyeball to eyeball over the Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, until the Soviets blinked. An understanding was reached between JFK and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, whereby America agreed to not invade Cuba in exchange for the Soviets removing their missiles from the island. Things then calmed down for 8 years, until soccer and Cuba helped trigger another crisis.

In 1970, Cuba began expanding naval facilities in Cayo Alcatraz, an island in the port of Cienfuegos, just as a flotilla of Soviet nuclear missile submarines was headed there. That September, US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger burst into the office of Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, and slapped U2 photos of the Cuban naval expansion, including soccer fields near Cienfuegos. “Those soccer fields mean war, Bob“, Kissinger exclaimed. “Cubans play baseball. Russians play soccer“. A Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0 was in the offing.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.