Today, more than six decades after the Cuban Revolution, the United States continues to enforce one of the most prolonged and comprehensive systems of economic warfare in modern history. The blockade—tightened, codified, and expanded over decades—seeks not merely to pressure, but to suffocate.
Sanctions on fuel, financial strangulation, extraterritorial enforcement, and constant efforts to disrupt Cuba’s access to energy and trade are not isolated measures; they form a coherent strategy aimed at exhausting a society that refuses to abandon its chosen path.
It is from this standpoint—not nostalgia, not abstract speculation—that the question must be posed: what would the relationship between Cuba and the United States look like if the balance of power had been different at a decisive historical moment?
By then, the Cuban Revolution had already crossed a line that Washington had never accepted could be crossed. This was not a routine political shift, nor even a radical reform. It was a rupture in ownership, sovereignty, and class rule. Cuba ceased to function as an extension of U.S. capital and began to exist on its own terms. That was enough.
The response followed a familiar pattern: invasion, sabotage, assassination attempts, diplomatic isolation, and an economic siege designed not simply to punish, but to break. None of this was improvised. It was the normal behavior of an imperial power confronted with defiance in what it considered its own sphere. Cuba was not targeted because it was unstable. It was targeted because it had proven that it could stand.
The deployment of Soviet missiles to the island in 1962 did not create this confrontation. It altered it. For the first time, the United States had to consider that an attack on Cuba might carry consequences it could not fully control. The long-standing asymmetry—where imperialism could escalate without fearing a comparable response—was briefly unsettled.
For a moment, Cuba was no longer simply exposed. It was shielded, however imperfectly, by a deterrent that imposed limits. As we know, that moment did not last.
The missiles stationed in Cuba were not under Cuban sovereign control. That fact matters, and it should not be blurred. The deterrent that emerged in October 1962 existed on Cuban soil, but its fate lay in the hands of a distant power. When the great revisionist Nikita Khrushchev chose to withdraw those missiles through negotiations with Washington, the decision did not merely reduce immediate tensions. It removed the only effective constraint that had been placed on U.S. freedom of action in the Caribbean, and it did so without the participation of the country most directly concerned.
This is where the issue must be located. The question is not whether nuclear war should have been avoided. Of course it should have been. No serious political position treats the annihilation of millions as an acceptable risk. But avoiding catastrophe does not resolve the contradictions that produced the crisis. It only displaces them.
In this case, they were displaced onto Cuba.
The settlement of the crisis left intact the central fact that had defined the preceding years: the United States remained committed to overturning the Revolution, while Cuba lacked the means to impose decisive fear on its adversary. What had briefly changed—the existence of a limit—was reversed.
Fidel Castro would later make clear, with characteristic clarity, that the security of a small country cannot depend on the promises of a powerful adversary. This was not a theoretical claim. It was the distilled experience of a revolution that had already faced invasion, sabotage, and permanent siege.
Che Guevara grasped the same reality from a broader angle. A revolutionary process, he insisted in substance, cannot rely on assurances from an enemy whose interests require its defeat. Imperialism does not become restrained because agreements are signed. It becomes restrained when it is forced to reckon with consequences it cannot easily absorb. This is the point where the discussion becomes uncomfortable, but it cannot be avoided.
None of this amounts to a defense of nuclear weapons. Marxists do not regard instruments capable of destroying humanity as anything other than products of a violent and antagonistic world order. The horizon must be their abolition. But political judgment cannot begin from that horizon alone. It must also begin from the world as it exists. And in that world, the absence of deterrence is not neutrality. It is exposure.
Imperialism does not act according to moral limits. It acts within the limits imposed upon it. Where the cost of aggression is low, it advances. Where the cost becomes unpredictable or unacceptable, it hesitates, recalculates, or changes form. This is not a matter of theory alone. It is one of the most persistent patterns of modern history.
In that light, the question is not whether a nuclear-armed Cuba would have transformed the nature of U.S. hostility. It would not have. The question is whether it would have altered the scope and confidence with which that hostility could be exercised. It is difficult to argue that it would not have.
What existed in October 1962 was not Cuban control over nuclear weapons, but something more limited and, in a sense, more revealing: a temporary condition in which imperialism was forced to confront a boundary it could not casually cross. When that condition was removed, the boundary disappeared with it.
It may be argued that Cuba—particularly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—would not have been able to sustain a nuclear deterrent independently. That objection, while not without basis, misses the central issue. Deterrence does not operate on the level of eternity, but on the level of historical periods. For nearly three decades, such a deterrent would have imposed a different strategic discipline on U.S. imperialism, reshaping not only its immediate calculations but its long-term assumptions about what could and could not be done to Cuba. Even its eventual disappearance would not erase the political consequences of its prior existence. If anything, the argument only reinforces the deeper contradiction: that the security of a revolutionary state was made contingent on decisions taken beyond its control.
The decades that followed did not bring peace in any meaningful sense. They brought a more stable form of pressure. The genocidal U.S. blockade remained and was further intensified. Covert operations continued. The Revolution was subjected to constant economic and political strain. The difference was that this pressure could be applied without the risk of escalation into something the United States could not manage.
This is where the doctrine of “peaceful coexistence” must be examined carefully, and without illusions.
In its basic formulation, the idea that states with different systems should avoid direct military confrontation is neither absurd nor inherently objectionable. In a nuclear age, the prevention of general war is a necessity. But the problem lies not in the principle itself. It lies in the way it was applied.
After Stalin’s death, this reorientation did not emerge gradually or innocently. It was formally codified at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where a new line began to take shape—one that presented “peaceful coexistence” not as a temporary condition within an ongoing struggle, but as a strategic framework capable of regulating that struggle itself. Under this approach, the antagonism between socialism and capitalism was no longer treated as a dynamic and irreconcilable conflict expressed unevenly across the global system, but increasingly as a relationship to be managed through state diplomacy at the highest level.
This was not a minor adjustment. It marked a qualitative shift. The center of gravity moved—from revolutionary initiative toward interstate equilibrium, from the expansion of anti-imperialist rupture toward the stabilization of relations between nuclear powers. What had been, in Lenin’s understanding, a tactical necessity within a hostile world began to assume the character of a guiding principle.
Cuba became one of the first and clearest points at which this contradiction surfaced in its sharpest form. For Moscow, the crisis was a problem of strategic balance with Washington. For Havana, it was a problem of survival under immediate threat. These were not interchangeable concerns. A doctrine that prioritizes the first without adequately addressing the second inevitably produces uneven outcomes.
Khrushchev’s decision must be understood within this framework. It was not simply an act of caution under pressure. It was the practical expression of a strategic line that placed the preservation of superpower equilibrium above the full and uncompromised defense of a revolutionary state confronting imperialism at close range. The withdrawal of the missiles was, in this sense, not only a retreat from confrontation, but a confirmation of priorities: stability at the level of the state system took precedence over the transformation of its most vulnerable frontiers.
That is what happened in 1962. The missiles were withdrawn. War was avoided. But the structure that allowed imperialism to exert sustained pressure on Cuba remained intact. What disappeared was not danger, but the one element that had briefly forced that danger into check.
This is why the question of deterrence returns, however uncomfortable it may be.
To acknowledge its importance is not to glorify it. It is to recognize that, within an unequal system, the ability to impose limits matters. Without such limits, imperialism does not become less aggressive. It becomes more confident.
The issue is not whether deterrence creates risks. It does. The issue is whether, in the case of a small revolutionary state facing a nearby imperial power with a proven record of intervention, the absence of deterrence creates a deeper and more permanent vulnerability. The history of Cuba after 1962 suggests that it does.
This is the contradiction that “peaceful coexistence,” in its historical form, failed to resolve. It reduced the risk of general war, but it did so in a way that left intact—and in some respects normalized—the ongoing subjection of exposed revolutionary states to pressure, coercion, and siege.
Cuba survived. That fact stands. But survival came under conditions that were neither neutral nor inevitable. The Revolution endured within a balance that remained structurally unequal, and the outcome of the missile crisis helped fix that balance in place.
The lesson, then, is neither a hymn to escalation nor a lament for what might have been. It is a recognition of how power actually operates. Imperialism does not abandon its objectives because it is reasoned with, nor does it restrain itself because equilibrium has been declared. It adjusts to limits. Where no such limits exist, it expands the field of coercion until it meets them.
Cuba understood this not as theory, but as lived reality. That is why, in the aftermath of the crisis, Fidel Castro insisted that “the security of a country cannot depend on the good faith of its enemy.” The statement was not rhetorical. It was a political conclusion drawn from experience.
In October 1962, for a brief and exceptional moment, the United States encountered such a limit in the Caribbean. It hesitated—not because it had renounced imperialism, but because the cost of acting had changed. When that limit was removed, the hesitation disappeared with it. What followed was not peace, but a long, disciplined form of pressure—one calibrated precisely because it no longer risked uncontrollable consequences.
This is the enduring truth the crisis leaves behind. Not that nuclear weapons secure justice—they do not—but that in a world structured by imperial force, vulnerability invites aggression, while constraint imposes caution. The tragedy of 1962 is not that war was avoided. It is that the avoidance of war was achieved in a way that restored to imperialism the very freedom of action it had briefly lost—and left revolutionary Cuba to confront, for decades, an adversary that had learned once again that it could press forward without fearing a limit it could not break.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.