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 and Secretary-General of the Organization of American States, José Antonio Mora to brief them on the US intelligence and their proposed response. All were supportive of the US position, except Macmillan who advocated appeasement. Shortly before his speech, Kennedy called former President Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy's conversation with the former President also revealed that the two were conspiring during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The two also anticipated that Khruschev would respond to the Western world in a matter that was similar to his response during the Suez Crisis and would possibly wind up trading off Berlin. On October 22 at 7:00