Afterwards The Cuban Missile Crisis in Post-Cold War Consciousness外文翻译.pdf

Afterword from Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse; Revised for the Fortieth Anniversary, by Bruce J. Allyn, James G. Blight, and David A. Welch. Lanham: Rowman Littlefield, 2002. Afterword: The Cuban Missile Crisis in Post-Cold War Consciousness The October Crisis is over. The Caribbean Crisis. The missile crisis. To name huge things is to begin to kill them. Words are small, meager . . . I want to preserve the clean and empty vision of the days of the crisis . . . Go beyond words. Get closer to the reality. —Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment Ten years after the Havana conference—and forty years after the world stood on the nuclear precipice—the Cuban missile crisis continues to exert a powerful influence on the public imagination. But already we are beginning to see the inexorable process by which historical events, when they recede far enough into the past, take on an antiquarian quality and gradually lose their visceral potency. Consider the American Civil War—an event that rent the very fabric of American society, left 600,000 dead, and changed forever the lives of those who survived. In a very real sense, the United States is still grappling with issues that gave rise to the Civil War, and with issues that arose because of it. But with every passing year, we look upon the Civil War with greater and greater detachment. For all but the recalcitrant, the nostalgic, and others obsessed with what they take to be a braver, bolder era of the mid-19th century, the American civil war has lost its immediacy, its poignancy, its passion. We can now take it up, turn it around, and examine its various angles in a cold ana