Eternity RPC Board
Actually, Castro didn't. Che Guevara did, but he was not calling the shots. The US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who negotiated with Castro and the Soviets at the time, later stated that both Castro and the Soviets showed they wanted to avoid war.
The war was avoided, in McNamara's view, because all sides ~trusted~ that none of them wanted a war. So nobody launched preemptively. But the whole situation was entirely to blame on Mr. Kennedy. The Soviets found him unreliable compared to Eisenhower, because Kennedy was prone to bend to domestic pressures, whereas Eisenhower was a man they could make agreements with.
Kennedy also subsequently got the US involved in Vietnam, he surrendered East-Berlin to the Soviets, and he was by all accounts a very poor president. His sudden death has made many forget about that - but he was terrible.
(edit: and then we haven't even discussed Kennedy's invention of a new American tradition: lying to Congress, withholding crucial information from the American public, and involving the US in overseas conflicts and countries without Congress approval or knowledge; Or Kennedy's silly conviction that if any country anywhere in the world fell to Commies it would lead to the destruction of the US)
The war was avoided, in McNamara's view, because all sides ~trusted~ that none of them wanted a war. So nobody launched preemptively. But the whole situation was entirely to blame on Mr. Kennedy. The Soviets found him unreliable compared to Eisenhower, because Kennedy was prone to bend to domestic pressures, whereas Eisenhower was a man they could make agreements with.
Kennedy also subsequently got the US involved in Vietnam, he surrendered East-Berlin to the Soviets, and he was by all accounts a very poor president. His sudden death has made many forget about that - but he was terrible.
(edit: and then we haven't even discussed Kennedy's invention of a new American tradition: lying to Congress, withholding crucial information from the American public, and involving the US in overseas conflicts and countries without Congress approval or knowledge; Or Kennedy's silly conviction that if any country anywhere in the world fell to Commies it would lead to the destruction of the US)