Please click to Digg our site.on this day the United States launched a devastating sneak attack on the small socialist republic island of Cuba.

Holding the private conviction that pre-emptively attacking a much smaller country without warning was not something the United States did, the Attorney General Robert Kennedy noted in his diary "Now I know what Tojo must have felt like when he was planning Pearl Harbor".

In his memoir of the crisis, he expanded on his opposition to a "reverse Pearl Harbour" by revealing the option of a naval blockade, or "quarantine". However, the President had been forced to eliminate that option due to lack of support from military and congressional leaders.

Throughout world capitals Stars and Strips Flags were burnt as opposition mounted to the American action. The unproven existence of so-called Cuban Missiles was not only hotly disputed, but also seen as a pretext for the American invasion which had been considered inevitable ever since Fidel Castro had seized power in 1959.