National Security Archive For the Havana conference, which took place during the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuban president Fidel Castro and former US secretary of defense Robert McNamara discussed newly declassified documents showing that US president John F. Kennedy, in meetings with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's son-in-law Adzhubei in January 1962, compared the US failure at the Bay of Pigs to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The Budapest conference of 1996, carried out by the Archive's "Openness in Russia and East Europe Project" in collaboration with Cold War International History Project and Russian and Eastern European partners, focused
Cuban Missile Crisis "no" difference... The military balance wasn't changed. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now." The EXCOMM agreed that the missiles would affect the "political" balance. Kennedy had explicitly promised the American people less than a month before the crisis that "if Cuba should possess a capacity to carry out offensive actions against the United States... the United States would act." Also, credibility among US allies and people would be damaged if the Soviet Union appeared to redress the strategic balance by placing missiles in Cuba. Kennedy explained after the crisis that "it would have politically changed