Living the Cuban Missile Crisis: An American Teacher's Memoir

By Donna Searle McLay

About the Book
In her vivid first-hand account, author Donna Searle McLay recounts the uncertainty, the confusion, and the intimate details of the voyage of several thousand civilians as the families of U.S. Navy and Marines stationed in Cuba were evacuated to Norfolk, Virginia, in October, 1962, at the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
President John F. Kennedy and Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed that nuclear war was not an option, and thus ended an international crisis, but only after days and weeks of behind-the-scenes meetings and concurrent wide-spread concerns by all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Jun 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886838916

Book preview

Dedication

I dedicate this book to all the families who were evacuated from the Guantánamo Naval Base on October 22, 1962; to all members of the Armed Forces who were deployed suddenly in case of attack on our country; to the political leaders who met and discussed the evolving situation; to the pilots who flew U-2 planes over Cuba to document the progress on the missile sites; to the team at the National Photographic Interpretation Center who studied and interpreted the photos, and finally, to President John F. Kennedy, whose unwavering determination to avoid nuclear war saved the world from destruction.

Foreword

I was a civilian teacher married to a Navy man when the Cuban Missile Crisis upended our lives on the Guantánamo Naval Base on October 22, 1962. I’ve often thought about the journey my young daughter and I made when evacuated to the States, and later, when we returned to Cuba.

There had been signs. Ooh, Mistress, terrible things happen, said Irene, our Cuban maid. She spent every other weekend at her home in Banes, about 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) away on the northern coast of Cuba. She reported armed strangers in uniform, big trucks driving at night without headlights, and people threatened with prison or worse if they were caught watching what was happening.

Meanwhile, American U-2 spy planes flying at 60,000 feet over Cuba watched the progress of the missile sites as Russian ships brought thousands of troops into Cuba. Some soldiers were disguised as agricultural workers in checked shirts and overalls, and some were outfitted in Arctic gear: clothing, skis, and all. These men made the journey in the holds of the Russian ships so aerial photos didn’t reveal them. They disembarked after dark so that the U.S. wouldn’t know of their presence.

This memoir chronicles my experiences simultaneously with the historical record of events, and contains information from declassified materials. In writing about these times, I hope to better understand the aftereffects those days, weeks, and months fraught with tension and uncertainty had on the lives of my family and me, as well as the ramifications for our nation.

Acknowledgements

With sincere thanks

to the following individuals and organizations:

West Chester University Writers Group

Goggleworks Writers Group

Dr. Elizabeth Kann

Frances (Glasspoole) Matlock

Photograph in Chapter 6 from

Boricua magazine, November 1962

Special thanks to Ellen Q. Morrow, whose skillful

work with formatting in Microsoft Word brought

a fine sense of order to the book.

Chapter One

The Lead-up to October 16, 1962

Wm. T. Sampson School, US Naval Base, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba August 1962

My husband, Ralph Searle, and I had arrived on the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, which we soon learned to call by its aviation letters, GTMO, (pronounced gitmo), in late July 1960. I was assigned to teach fifth grade at the William T. Sampson School, (a fifth to twelfth grade school for dependents of military and civilian personnel assigned to the base), and he was assigned to the Military Police.

I taught fifth grade for the August 1960 – May 1961 school year. During the year I found out I was pregnant, and applied for a leave of absence for the 1961 – 1962 school year. Our daughter Laura was born in August 1961.

I was at home with Laura for her first year, but when I returned to the classroom in August of 1962,¹ I would pack a lunch and eat at school during the 11:30 – 1:00 lunch break. While we ate in the teachers’ lounge, conversations about teaching were a bonus. They included tales by the school’s long-term professional employees who’d served in places such as Rabat, Morocco, the Philippines, as well as elsewhere in the world. These tales were fascinating. I tried to imagine soaking my lettuce in Clorox water for thirty minutes to make it safe for my family to eat, because it had been grown with night soil² as fertilizer. Fortunately, we did not have to do that in Cuba.

Aboard the Omsk

August 25, 1962

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The first ship to depart from Russia was the 10,825-ton Omsk. The Japanese-built freighter normally carried timber, so it had hatches large enough to accommodate missiles. The 67-foot-long rockets had to be stored in a diagonal position, propped up against a wall. Space was so limited that only Colonel Ivan Sidarov and his senior officers slept in cabins. Ordinary Russian soldiers were crammed into the ‘tween deck space beneath the bridge, normally used for storage. In all, 264 men had to share four thousand square feet of living space, just sixteen square feet per person, barely enough to lie down.

Sidarov’s men had no idea where they were going or why they were being deployed. Instructions on the route to follow were contained in a series of sealed envelopes, to be opened jointly by the commander of the regiment, the ship’s captain, and the senior KGB representative. The first set of instructions ordered them to proceed to the Bosporus and the second to proceed to Gibraltar. It was only after the Omsk had passed through the Mediterranean and entered the Atlantic that they opened the third set of instructions, which ordered them to proceed to Cuba.³

The atmosphere below decks was stifling. The sun beat down on the heavy metal hatches, at times pushing the temperature to over 120°F. Humidity reached 95%. Seasickness was a terrible problem. The ship rode high in the water due to the relatively light weight of the missiles, and was tossed about by the waves when she ran into a severe storm in the middle of the Atlantic.

When the Omsk docked in Casilda on the southern coast