If We Knew Then What We Know Now

Cuban Missile Crisis (Background)

Lesson Plan Using Online Resources

Objectives

Students will:

• Simulate the elaborate and often complicated processes involved in foreign policy decision-making.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the causes and origins of the hostile, mutual misperceptions that characterized the U.S.-Cuba relationship in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
• Collaborate within groups, working effectively to organize presentations.
• Utilize primary sources to understand the day-to-day, real-time positions that both U.S. and Cuban officials adopted relative to one another during the period.

Purpose

This lesson is designed for use before students study October 1962 and the missile crisis itself. After the lesson, students will understand the forces at work in the triangular relationship among Cuba, the U.S.S.R., and the U.S. that made it relatively easy for the world to come close to the brink of nuclear war.

Pre-lesson Reading Materials

Watson Institute Choices unit, The Cuban Missile Crisis: Considering its Place in Cold War History (pp. 8-13)

Group Structure and Preparation

The classroom should be divided into 4 groups of 4-5 students each, two groups representing the Cuban position, two the American. Smaller classes may be divided into two larger groups. Students in the groups will role-play intelligence analysts assigned the task of predicting and recommending responses to the future actions of the rival group.

Each group will be responsible for:

1. reading and analyzing a unique set of primary, classified intelligence documents (see below),
2. predicting the future behavior of the group's adversary (for the Cubans, Kennedy; for the United States, Castro) and its "next move" based on the information gathered above,
3. creating a one-page written briefing to the leadership including a summary of the group's findings, recommended action, and justification for that action.

Handouts

• American Student Group (one for each group)
• Cuban Student Group (one for each group
• Document Analysis Worksheet (all groups, multiple copies for each group)
• Assessment Guide for Written Policy Briefing (one for each student)

In the Classroom

• Divide the room such that each group has its own space in which to work. Assign a group director to each group to manage the group's activities. You may wish to assign other roles as well.
• Distribute the handouts to the proper groups. You may wish to facilitate a discussion, either as an entire classroom or within groups, in which the teacher alternatively assumes the role of the U.S. and Cuban leaders. It might prove instructive during this process for the teacher to role-play various leadership styles. For example, the instructor might take on a demanding and authoritarian tone with one group, requiring detailed predictions and listening only to the group director, while assuming a more open posture with the other, welcoming conflicting opinions from all group members (students may be assigned these roles as well, numbers permitting).
• Ask students to complete the Document Analysis Worksheet for each document they investigate and to complete the policy briefing together as the handout suggests. Each side is likely to develop dramatically different predictions about the future behavior of the other.
• Ask the groups to present their positions as follows:

Cuban Presentations

The leader for each group orally presents his or her one-page written policy briefing. Once completed, ask the Cuban students to identify which of the following methods of weakening their government they think were actually considered by the U.S. government.

CUBA GROUP: MYTH or FACT?

1. dropping hundreds of free airline tickets by plane into Cuba
2. sabotage of Cuban radio towers, radar stations, and telephone exchanges
3. construction of a doctored photograph of Castro living in wealth and luxury
surrounded by beautiful women, to be air dropped later throughout Cuba

U.S. Presentations

The leader for each group orally presents his or her one-page written policy briefing. Once completed, ask the U.S. students to identify which of the following methods of protecting Cuba they think were successfully undertaken by the Castro regime.

U.S. GROUP: MYTH or FACT?

1. placement on Cuban soil of thousands of Soviet troops to repel U.S. invasion
2. installation of Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuban soil
3. firing on U.S. surveillance planes
• Explain that all of the above were proposed or undertaken, and ask students to identify the forces that made it so easy for each side to misunderstand the other. When asked about their decisions today, U.S. foreign policy leaders from the Kennedy administration make it very clear that overthrowing Castro was not a top priority. At Critical Oral History conferences their Cuban counterparts still find this hard to believe. This lesson should make it clear how this mutual misperception took root.
• As the class studies the missile crisis itself, emphasize the tendency of U.S. leaders to see events in Cuba through the prism of Moscow rather than Havana to assume that Khrushchev has more control over events in Cuba than is in fact the case. What are the implications of this miscalculation for current foreign policy problems like the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons? Is the Cuban missile crisis solely a Cold War lesson, or does it now have more meaning—not less—in the 21st century world?

Note: You may wish to spread this lesson out over multiple days or reduce the requirements of each group to suit your curriculum.

Assessment Tools

• Quiz on the reading

Answers:

1. T; 2. F (Castro); 3. T; 4. T; 5. T; 6. T; 7. F (Truman Doctrine) 8. T;  9. Soviet Union and U.S.; 10. Bay of Pigs.

• Provide study guide questions on pp. TRB-10 and TRB-11 for students after they read pp. 8-13 of the Cuban missile crisis student text.

Assessment Guide for Written Policy Briefing: Rubric

Provide students an opportunity to view the rubric before they begin work. Highlight the level you think represents the groups' written work at the time you are reviewing the work.  Use the comments box to make specific suggestions for improvement or to highlight what works especially well in the current written briefing.  Provide the group the opportunity to rework its briefing and resubmit its written work.

This lesson was developed by:
Matthew Heys—Millard West High School, Omaha, Nebraska
Catrina Pelton—Benson High School, Omaha, Nebraska
Todd Wallingford—Hudson High School, Hudson, Massachusetts
Kathy Dewsbury White—Ingham Intermediate School District, Ingham County, Michigan