Castro and Khrushchev stole the show at the UN 60 years ago

Deepening animosity between the world’s two largest economies. An impetuous and unpredictable leader of a nuclear-armed superpower. And a United States of America convulsed by racial turmoil and just weeks away from a historic presidential election. Headline news, not from 2020, but from 60 years ago.

In September 1960 a stellar cast of world statesmen – including Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States; Nikita Khrushchev, the pugnacious leader of the Soviet Union; the prime ministers of the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; and major players from across Africa and Asia, including Nehru, Sukarno, Kwame Nkrumah and Nasser – gathered in New York, for the opening of the UN General Assembly, at a critical moment in history.

Despite a brief thaw in the Cold War, which had seen Khrushchev meet with Eisenhower at Camp David in September 1959, hopes for a meaningful rapprochement had quickly soured. In the bitter aftermath of the U-2 incident, in which an American spy plane had been shot down over Russia on 1 May 1960, and its pilot Francis Gary Powers captured, Khrushchev lashed out at the perfidy of the US. 

Storming out of disarmament talks in Paris later that month, the Soviet leader retaliated by ratcheting up the tension over Berlin. Deep in communist East Germany, the divided city – which remained occupied by Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union – was viewed by Khrushchev as a ‘fishbone in his throat’. Travelling back from Paris, the Soviet leader had stopped off in East Berlin where, before an audience of 10,000, he denounced Eisenhower’s ‘treachery’ and threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany – a move that would have ended Western rights of occupation. 

While diplomats were keeping a nervous eye on Berlin, a far greater crisis was underway in the former Belgium colony of the Congo. Pre-independence elections, held in May, had seen Patrice Lumumba – a former postal clerk, and left-wing nationalist – become prime minister. 

The Belgians, who, to put it mildly, had little time for Lumumba, were incensed when, in an independence-day speech delivered before an audience that included Baudouin, King of the Belgians, he excoriated the “injustice, oppression, and exploitation" of the former colonial regime and celebrated the "end to the humiliating bondage which was imposed upon us by force”. 

“We shall show the world,” Lumumba declared, ‘what the black man can do when working in liberty, and we shall make the Congo the pride of Africa.’ 

It was not to be. Almost immediately, the country began to fragment; in July, with the active encouragement of Belgian mining interests and government officials, the mineral-rich province of Katanga attempted to secede.  As the country slipped into chaos, and Belgium sent in troops to protect its citizens, Lumumba appealed to the UN for help. 

On 13 July, the Security Council voted to send thousands of peacekeepers to oversee a Belgian withdrawal and ensure the Congo’s stability. But, dismayed that the forces would not be immediately sent into Katanga, Lumumba turned to Moscow for assistance.

Unlike Stalin, who had viewed non-communist movements for national liberation in Africa and Asia as “class enemies”, Khrushchev was keen to build anti-imperialist alliances across a Third World that was decolonising rapidly: 1960, the so-called Year of Africa, saw 16 African countries, including Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Senegal, join the UN. 

Khrushchev argued that the Soviet Union offered the newly independent nations a clear alternative to the capitalist West’s model of economic modernisation – and, crucially, one that was free from the stain of colonial exploitation. In early August 1960, Khrushchev had promised Lumumba the “friendly and disinterested help of the Soviet government”. Arms, as well as humanitarian aid, soon followed. 

American officials, now convinced that the Congolese prime minister was a communist and a threat to the West’s economic interests, began covertly to seek his removal: the CIA hatched an assassination plot, and the Eisenhower administration encouraged the Congolese military to take over. On the eve of the General Assembly, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the army chief of staff, staged a coup. Lumumba, holed up in his official residence, was now reliant on UN troops to prevent his arrest.

While these extraordinary international dramas were unfolding, the UN’s host nation, the US, was itself on the cusp of seismic political and social change.

Back on 1 February, a bold new front in the struggle for African American civil rights had opened up, when four black students at North Carolina’s Agricultural and Technical College had sat-in at a “whites only” lunch counter at the F W Woolworth store, in downtown Greensboro, and demanded service. 

After being refused, the young men remained seated for an hour – politely rebuffing requests to leave – until the store closed. The experience was personally, as well as politically, transformative; as 19-year-old Franklin McCain explained: “If it’s possible to know what it means to have your soul cleansed – I felt pretty clean at that time. I probably felt better on that day than I’ve ever felt in my life . . . a lot of feelings of guilt or what-have-you suddenly left me, and I felt as though I had gained my manhood, so to speak.” 

The following morning, McCain and his three friends were joined by more than a dozen others, and the protests quickly mushroomed: by the end of April some 50,000 students had taken part in protests across 70 southern towns and cities, with more than 2,000 arrested. The direct-action phase of the civil rights movement was underway.

If racial and social tumult was not enough, the US was also in the midst of a gripping political contest. With Eisenhower nearing 70 and in his final year of office, the 47-year-old Republican Richard Nixon was battling John F Kennedy, his 43-year-old Democratic rival, for the presidency. In this close-fought race, one thing was certain: power would shortly pass to a new generation of leaders, the first to be born in the 20th century. 

In the event, the 15th General Assembly would be one of the most extraordinary in the history of the UN. That this was the case owed more than a little to the antics of Fidel Castro, the 34-year-old leader of revolutionary Cuba. 

Barely 24 hours after his arrival in New York, and with wild rumours circulating that the Cubans had been plucking and cooking chickens in their rooms, and extinguishing cigars on the carpets, Fidel – dressed in his trademark drab olive fatigues – stormed out of the plush Shelburne Hotel after being asked to stump up an additional security deposit. 

After meeting with the UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, and threatening to set up a makeshift camp in the UN Rose Garden, the Cuban leader accepted an offer of hospitality from the Hotel Theresa, the so-called Waldorf of Harlem. Over the coming days, Castro would receive a rapturous reception from the local African-American community, hold court with a succession of political and cultural luminaries – including Malcolm X, Allen Ginsberg, Nikita Khrushchev, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Kwame Nkrumah – give a record-breaking four-and-a-half-hour speech before the General Assembly, and promote the politics of anti-imperialism, racial equality, and leftist revolution with a fervour, and an audacity, that would make him an icon of the 1960s.

Nikita Khrushchev, meanwhile, was by turns amiable and aggressive – famously embracing Fidel on the sidewalk outside the Theresa, and again at the UN; holding impromptu press conferences, and joshing with journalists, from the balcony of the Soviet Mission on Park Avenue; and sending his fellow guests into peals of laughter at a reception hosted by Nehru, by pointing to his girth and declaring that he was resolved henceforth to live on cabbages, while simultaneously preparing to feast on Dover Sole, chicken curry, and roast lamb. 

These displays of jocularity contrasted starkly with his behaviour in the Assembly Hall itself. On September 29, for instance, the Soviet leader appeared to take great offence at Harold Macmillan when, in his speech, the British prime minister praised the energy and integrity of the UN Secretary General and endorsed a system of international inspection and control to help bring about meaningful disarmament. 

Glowering, gesticulating and banging on his desk, Khrushchev eventually leaped to his feet and began shouting – in Russian. Macmillan paused, looked up from his notes and, in an effective put-down that prompted ripples of laughter throughout the chamber, simply said: “I’d like that translated, if I may.”

It was, Eisenhower later recalled, an example of “British reserve in its finest flower”. Most famously of all, on the afternoon of 12 October, when a Filipino diplomat accused the Soviet Union of practising “colonialism” in Eastern Europe, Khrushchev, his face flushed red, leaped to his feet and began pounding on his desk with his right shoe – a brown loafer, it was said.

The events that surrounded the 15th General Assembly proved consequential. The admission of the new African states, together with the adoption of Resolution 1514, which declared the process of liberation “irresistible and irreversible” and called for a “speedy end to colonialism in all its forms”, constituted a powerful symbolic blow against imperialism – although the fate of Patrice Lumumba, who was executed on 13 January 1961, after being captured while seeking to rally support in the north of the country, showed that early hopes of anticolonial nationalists might remain unfulfilled. Indeed, during his own speech at the General Assembly, Fidel presciently observed that “it is very easy to raise a flag, choose a coat of arms, sing an anthem and put another colour on the map” but “there can be no political independence unless there is economic independence”.

The excellent personal chemistry between Fidel and Khrushchev, meanwhile, cemented a critically important strategic alliance between Cuba and the USSR, in the process illustrating how the Cold War’s focus was shifting, inexorably, from Europe to the Global South. Fidel’s behaviour in New York, moreover, convinced the Americans that he had to go.

 In April 1961, a CIA-trained band of Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs, in a doomed attempt to establish a bridgehead and spark a popular uprising, in an operation authorised by the new president, John F Kennedy. 

In the aftermath of the failed invasion, Cuba accepted Moscow’s offer to station dozens of nuclear-armed missiles on the island – a decision that, in October 1962, would take the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Thankfully, Khrushchev blinked first – but his brinkmanship over Cuba, as well as his earlier erratic behaviour in New York, would be used against him when he was removed from power, by his onetime protégé, Leonid Brezhnev, in October 1964.

Finally, Fidel returned from New York with his international standing, and commitment to lead the global struggle against imperialism, bolstered. Over the coming decade or so, Havana hosted a series of high-profile conferences that brought together left-wing radicals, freedom fighters, and anti-colonial nationalists from across the Global South, such as Salvador Allende (Chile), Amílcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau) and Angela Davis (US), while Fidel’s government offered practical as well as ideological support to a host of liberation movements across Latin America and Africa – including in Algeria, Angola, and Bolivia.

Covid-19 means that the 75th General Assembly is going to look, and feel, very different to its predecessors. Although Donald Trump is said to be considering delivering his speech in person , the vast majority of world leaders are set to participate remotely. 

Moreover, the UN itself is struggling to carve out a meaningful role at a moment in history when support for multilateralism, and the wider liberal rules-based order, appears to be in precipitous decline. 

Those hoping that the 75th General Assembly might develop a coordinated response to the global pandemic, reduce the threat of a new ‘Cold War’ between the US and China, tackle the climate emergency, and defuse the series of crises afflicting North Africa and the Middle East, are likely to be disappointed. That said, the UN General Assembly is – as we saw 60 years ago – capable of springing a surprise or two.

Simon Hall’s latest book, Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s, is out now