A real simple question i have yet to hear a good answer for. Why has history blamed the USSR and Cuba for this, given that the USSR's positioning of the missiles was a respone to the US positioning missiles in Turkey and aiming them at the USSR ? I would have thought the Soviet response was exactly what would be expected. If you aim nuclear missiles at a country who also has these weapons you must expect retaliation. It would be iresponsible for any government to allow another state to threaten to wipe its people out without making some sort of response.

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Viva Fidel

"If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism"

"North Americans don't understand... that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity"

winners write history

Same as Miriya's point really, the USSR didn't write history and we live under an agressive capitalism at the moment.

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Trust me, I'm a socialist!

There's power in a factory,power in the land, power in the hand of the worker. But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand, there is power in a union.
The union forever defending our rights, down with the blackleg, workers unite. To our brothers and our sisters in many far off lands, there is power in a union.
Money speaks for money, the devil for his own. - Billy Bragg

That is the only decent answer i have ever got. Most people try to justify the line that it was the USSR's fault. But really it just seems to be a form of Victors Justice.

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Viva Fidel

"If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism"

"North Americans don't understand... that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity"

I agree with others here that the victors write the history but I think one possible answer is that the United States portrays itself as the good guy, making the world safe for "democracy" (even though the United States is a constitutional republic and not a democracy), defender of liberty, etc. USSR, then, was the epitome of totalitarian oppression and a perceived threat to everything good and decent in the world.

The truth of the matter is, though, that the United States had no business interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and, so, should not have been bullying Turkey and other European countries into letting it park a bunch of nukes in their backyard.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

You obviously didn't learn about the issue from Russian or Cuban history books - they certainly would see the issue differently.

As far as I'm concerned, the Cuban missile crisis showed two things. The Russians were imperialist warmongers and the Americans were imperialist warmongers.

May the better imperialist warmonger win.

And it did.

Yeh, the Americans were better at imperialistic war-mongering.

__________________
Trust me, I'm a socialist!

There's power in a factory,power in the land, power in the hand of the worker. But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand, there is power in a union.
The union forever defending our rights, down with the blackleg, workers unite. To our brothers and our sisters in many far off lands, there is power in a union.
Money speaks for money, the devil for his own. - Billy Bragg

Kennedy had to keep face. It was bone headed move that nearly landed us into WWIII. Kruschev was justified and our military morons who put the missles there in the first place were just that -- morons. Thankfully both leaders were cool headed enough not to go to war over it.

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both sides were at fault to a degree in the heat of the cold war (hmmm that sounds odd oh well)