To the Editor:
In my review of the second edition (revised) of James Wilkie’s The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910 (HAHR, May, 1971), I suggested that the author might have considered some of the methodological queries raised by Professors Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith in their review essay in the Latin American Research Review (Spring, 1970). It has been brought to my attention that the revised edition was already in press when the exchange of views occurred. Even a non-quantifier such as I should have been able to calculate that the time lapse between the LARR article and appearance of the revised edition was insufficient. My apologies to Mr. Wilkie.
The University of Nebraska
Michael C. Meyer
To the Editor:
In the August, 1971 edition of the HAHR, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy was reviewed by Ramón Eduardo Ruiz (University of California, San Diego). He fisted several questions that he considered unanswered by Robert Kennedy or by anyone else. One of these questions was, “Why did the Soviets place missiles in Cuba?”
Let me answer this question: the Communist Chinese pressured the Soviets into getting tough with the West. Russia was not doing its share of exporting the Communist Revolution, Peking charged. This view was suggested before the crisis in Donald S. Zagoria’s article, “The Sino-Soviet Conflict and the West” (Foreign Affairs, Vol. 41, October, 1962).
Mr. Zagoria wrote: “Our dangers (of Communism) may increase if Peking’s charges that Moscow is soft toward the West goad the Russians into adopting a harsher attitude” (p. 171). That Moscow was goaded into a harsher attitude was proven by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This view is further supported by Professor Jules Davids’ book, America and the World of Our Time. United States Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (third edition; Random House: New York, 1970). Writing after the crisis, Professor Davids (Georgetown University) said the missiles were sent “to demonstrate to Peking and to the world Communist parties that Soviet opposition to the ‘imperialists’ had not weakened.” He suggested other reasons as well, such as Premier Khrushchev’s agricultural and industrial failures in Russia itself (p. 541).
Thus there was a relationship between the Sino-Soviet rift and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Sino-Soviet rift was one answer to the question, “Why did the Soviets place missiles in Cuba?”
Herbert H. Lehman College New York
Alfred Elkins
