Cuba

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The United States supported Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar in order to ensure that Cuba would have a Democratic form of government, while the Soviet Union supported Fidel Castro in order to ensure that Cuba would have a Communistic form of government.

Within three days of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the US military was either captured or killed. The Bay of Pigs fiasco diminish US prestige, and may have also have encouraged the Soviets to the deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba as a way to prevent farther invasion.