In contrast, the film shows that the U.S. agreed to remove the missiles from Turkey simultaneously and that this information had been leaked out by the administration - as was shown in the picketing scene outside the White House. I am not sure why the writers would have chosen to do this other than to make the U.S. look more reasonable in their negotiations with the Soviet's, or perhaps simply to add more drama.
Another major part of the Missile Crisis that was described in the text was the involvement of Fidel Castro, which was completely over-looked in the film. Although the focus of the entire Crisis was centered around Cuba, Castro was portrayed more as a pawn in the middle of the tensions between the two larger Soviet and American powers. His involvement, apparently, was very limited. There is a rare mention of him scattered throughout my sources. One book provided the logical explanation that, amongst the intense tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union concerning the possibility of an all out nuclear war, the issue of Castro's take over in Cuba was relatively insignificant. However, in relation to this view, I found it interesting that the United States did not consider Castro's take over of power as a significant encroachment of the Soviets in there sphere of influence (prior to the Crisis), yet the missiles were considered to be of such importance because they posed a military threat. At least that was the opinion of one source, however, I was under the impression that the U.S. did consider Castro a significant threat to their influence in the Caribbean, and that they had already attempted to oust him in the Bay of Pigs invasion (Spanier, 1987).
The film does, however, give an excellent representation of the important process of "crisis management " that was key in the nuclear era, in which a crisis could essentially be seen as a substitute for war. This as was demonstrated in the film, is a process marked by caution and restraint rather than the impulsiveness and recklessness that took place in the pre-nuclear era.
