La crisis de los misiles de Cuba 1962

In his new book, Max Hastings focuses on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the thirteen days in October 1962 that kept the world on the brink of nuclear abyss. It takes a fresh look at this historic moment from the different points of view of national leaders, Russian officials, Cuban peasants, American pilots, and British decommissioners, while providing interviews with eyewitnesses, archival documents and diaries, tape recordings of the White House, to offer an approximate portrait of the Cold War in Fidel Castro's Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev's USSR and Kennedy's United States. Beyond the military history and the confrontation, Hastings delves into the root causes that led to the conflict, from the situation of Cuba allied with the United States under the command of Batista to Castro's regime of extreme hostility towards the Americans, going through the feeling of weakness of the Soviets before the Americans after the Second World War and their need for reaffirmation in the pulse of the cold war. The Cuban crisis highlighted the nuclear risk, as well as the difficulty of making a good strategy in the face of the enemy's incomprehension. In this sense, Hastings describes in detail and in an innovative way the attitudes and behavior of Russians, Cubans and Americans, while analyzes the climate of tension that affected the entire world in the face of one of the most critical episodes of the second half of the 20th century.