World: The East’s Reply

The Russians got the news from the Caribbean every day last week, but only after it was sifted through the Kremlin strainer. A full 14 hours after Kennedy went on U.S. television. Radio Moscow finally began chronicling the facts: the President’s speech, the proclamation of the blockade, the U.S. military preparations under way at Key West. Moscow even let it be known that a Russian chartered freighter was boarded and searched by the U.S. Only one detail was never mentioned: the Russian missiles in Cuba.

Ink for the Embassy. Not understanding why the U.S. had acted, Russians were prepared to be indignant, if also a little frightened, when Pravda told them: “The American ruling quarters are acting like cowardly beasts . . . The imperialist aggressors must remember that if they try to fan the fire of world war, they will inevitably burn in its flames.” At that, endless resolutions from factories and collective farms poured in to Moscow sympathizing with poor little Cuba. A Moscow circus staged a “Cuban Carnival” in which Russians disguised as Cubans danced wildly to Latin music and raced about with beards and burp guns in pursuit of counterrevolutionaries.

Anticipating a different kind of carnival, American diplomats in Moscow boarded up the embassy’s ground-floor windows. A few hours later, 200 Russian students gathered before the building waving placards and shouting “Cuba yes, Yankee No!” Bottles of purple ink were hurled against the embassy wall before 50 Russian militiamen broke up the crowd. This first contrived affair was relatively mild. Later 3,000 ink-hurling students and workers smashed windows and chanted slogans for 3½ hours.

In Prague, demonstrators tore the Stars and Stripes from the U.S. embassy flag pole and smashed windows in a noisy, well-organized rally. In East Berlin, Red Boss Walter Ulbricht let 250,000 workers and students off for the afternoon as processions marched down Unter den Linden bearing placards labeled “Rescue Cuba” and “Ami gohome.”

Wine for the Basso. Khrushchev him self stayed outwardly calm. In the midst of the crisis, he took 3½ hours to chat with a visiting American, Westinghouse Electric Vice President William E. Knox, who was in Moscow for a conference on industrial research. Spotting a picture of bearded Karl Marx on the wall, Knox moved Khrushchev to guffaws by remarking: “I didn’t know that Marx was a Cuban.” When Rumania’s Communist leaders came through town, Khrushchev took them to a 3¾-hour performance of Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi Theater, where he loudly applauded U.S. Basso Jerome Hines. Afterward Khrushchev jovially raised a glass as his pal First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan offered toasts in champagne to culture and, smiling at the singer’s pretty wife, to American women. “May God bless you,” responded Basso Hines, still decked out in the Czarist garb he wore for his role.

To Americans who knew the facts, Moscow seemed eerily normal. Newspapers kept complaining about poor food production, couples on crowded dance floors kept doing their bunny hug and wishing they could find out something about the twist, soldiers with their girls wandered to the Lenin mausoleum to hear the Kremlin bells toll midnight.

Behind the façade of normalcy, grim business proceeded. The Chaika limousines of Moscow’s top officials rolled in and out of the Kremlin as the Council of Ministers met. Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky put his vast air, sea and land force on a state of alert. None of this could disguise the fact that, stage by stage, Khrushchev was backing away from conflict. His offer of a deal with the West told the astonished Russian public for the first time that Russian missiles were in Cuba. His agreement to withdraw them was of course hailed by press and radio as a major gesture for world peace.