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 in a "Memorandum for the President" describing the "Post Mortem on Cuba." Kennedy's Oval Office telephone conversation with Eisenhower soon after Khrushchev's message arrived revealed that the President was planning to use the Cuban Missile Crisis to escalate tensions with Khrushchev and in the long run, Cuba as well. The President also claimed that he thought the crisis would result in direct military confrontations in Berlin by the end of the next month. He also claimed in his conversation with Eisenhower that the Soviet leader had offered to withdraw from Cuba in exchange for the withdrawal of missiles from Turkey