Some of the Answers

The President had not held a press conference for ten weeks. A month had passed since his last major public pronouncement about Cuba. Thus, when Kennedy finally faced newsmen last week, there were plenty of questions to be answered. And answer them he did--up to a point. Beyond that point, he left unresolved some issues basic to the meaning of the Cuban crisis.

For days, messages had sped back and forth between Washington and Moscow; White House aides proudly let it be known that it now took only an hour and a half for a written communication to leave Kennedy's desk and land on Khrushchev's. The contents of many of those messages remains undisclosed, but it is certain that Kennedy at one point told Khrushchev that the U.S. would have to take new and perhaps drastic action if the

Soviet Union did not remove the IL-28 bombers it had sent to Castroland. It was clearly implied that 6 p.m., the time Kennedy set for his press conference, was the deadline for a favorable reply.

Fit of Pique. Hours before that deadline came the first hint of a Russian backdown. Fidel Castro sent a letter to the U.N.'s Acting Secretary-General U Thant withdrawing his objections to the removal of the bombers from Cuba; they were, he said in a characteristic fit of pique, old and inferior aircraft anyhow. Kennedy paid no public attention to Castro's message. He was still waiting for word from the Kremlin, and it came shortly after noon on the day of the press conference.

Khrushchev, Kennedy told newsmen and the nation over television, had agreed to get his bombers out of Cuba within 30 days (just why it would take 30 days remained unclear, and no one asked). That being the case, Kennedy was ordering that the naval blockade of Cuba be lifted (just why it was being lifted before the planes were actually removed was also not made clear).

Khrushchev's new retreat could, from a U.S. viewpoint, only be called progress. But there remained room for much more progress. Still in Cuba were Russian nationals--and for the first time, Kennedy described them as "ground combat units." More importantly, when Kennedy had first announced his quarantine of Cuba, he made it perfectly plain that on-site inspection was the only way to make sure that Soviet missiles had really been removed. But Castro, despite Khrushchev's pledge to let U.N. inspectors into Cuba, remained obdurate. Therefore, said Kennedy at his press conference, the U.S., even while continuing negotiations toward inspection, would continue its aerial reconnaissance flights over Cuba.

Kennedy was closely questioned about the contents of his communications with Khrushchev. Had he made any commitments of which the public remained unaware? No. Did his "no invasion" promise in effect guarantee Castro's continued, unhampered existence? Well, for one thing, Kennedy indicated that there would be no such pledge until the U.S.'s inspection terms were met. Even then, said Administration aides, it would remain a cardinal point of U.S. policy to see Castro unseated, if only through economic and political pressures. The U.S. has been urging its allies, with some success, to give up trade with Cuba and restrict ships flying their flags from carrying goods there, is ready with a four-point plan that would deny U.S. port privileges and business to foreign shipowners whose ships continue to enter Cuban ports.

Critical Question. After the President's press conference, a sense of lull settled over the nation. The 63 ships that comprised the blockade force steamed back toward their home ports. The Pentagon announced that 14,200 Air Force reservists, called up at the height of the Cuba crisis, were being released. In a Thanksgiving message, President Kennedy said that "there is much for which we can be grateful as we look back to where we stood only four weeks ago."

All well and good. There could be no doubt but that the U.S. position vis a vis not only Cuba but the entire Communist world had been visibly advanced during those four weeks. But that critical question remained: What to do about Castro? For so long as he remains in power, the Caribbean will remain in crisis and Cuba will be a staging area for Communist subversion, or outright aggression, throughout Latin America. Long before the Soviet missile buildup in Cuba became apparent, it was obvious that Castro was a threat to vital U.S. interests in the Caribbean. Now the U.S. hopes that economic and political pressures will be enough to topple a discredited Castro--and such look-no-hands methods would certainly be preferable to the use of arms. But if they do not work, then the U.S. will not have advanced nearly as far in the past few weeks as President Kennedy hopes--and it may be necessary to start all over again in the painful process of ousting Cuba's Communist dictator.

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