Oscar Larralde vividly recalls the explosions that brought down an American spy plane over Cuba in 1962; His island nation was caught in the eye of a nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The then 17-year-old bank clerk and later soldier was convinced that the moment would mean the downfall of his country.
“We should be cremated,” he recalled at the time.
As nuclear threats threaten Russia’s invasion of Ukraine again, the retired colonel lauds the diplomacy that averted full-blown war 60 years ago and hopes common sense will prevail again.
In 1962 Larralde was deployed to the eastern port city of Banes in the communist province of Holguin Cuba.
On October 27, he was walking on a secluded beach when he heard a roar the likes of which he had never heard before and felt two explosions high above his head, “very loud, very strong.”
“I didn’t know what it was,” the former soldier recalled.
He later learned that two Soviet surface-to-air missiles were involved, one of which shot down a US U-2 spy plane, killing pilot Major Rudolf Anderson – at the age of 35 the only victim of the so-called Cuba Crisis.
“An officer told us that a Soviet-operated anti-aircraft group shot down a Yankee plane,” Larralde told AFP.
“The reaction of the fighters on that first line of defense — because we were the first to clash with the Yankees — was excitement, joy,” he recalled.
“We asserted our sovereignty. They entered planes that violated Cuban airspace,” added Larralde.
But the celebration soon turned to fear of the consequences “when the Yankees found out.”
– “A Difficult Time” –
Two weeks before Anderson’s death, US reconnaissance planes had taken photos of Soviet work on missile launch sites in Cuba – within range of American shores.
Then-President John F. Kennedy warned Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that the United States would attack unless the missiles were withdrawn.
Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and mobilized 140,000 troops, while Fidel Castro put 400,000 of his own people on alert in anticipation of a military invasion.
Then Anderson was shot down.
Even as some in the Pentagon urged Kennedy to strike, diplomacy won, and on October 28 — the day after the plane was shot down — Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missiles in exchange for a US pledge not to invade Cuba .
“In a very difficult time, the USSR and the United States managed to negotiate and find a solution to the conflict,” Larralde told AFP from a rusty launch pad with a disused Soviet missile buried in a memorial in La Anita in converted near Banes.
Six decades later, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats against the West in his war against former Soviet neighbor Ukraine have revived chilling memories of the last time the world stood on the brink of nuclear war.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I think we’re in more danger than we’ve ever been, in many ways more than we were in 1962,” said Hal Klepak, a strategy expert at the Royal Military College of Canada.
For ex-Cuban diplomat Carlos Alzugaray, the big fear today, as it was 60 years ago, is that things “could accidentally escalate.
But Larralde hopes that this time, like last time, there will be peace.
“It is important to negotiate to ensure world peace or humanity will continue to be gripped by the possibility of a new nuclear conflict,” he mused.
