 Guevara , who was practically the architect of the Soviet @-@ Cuban relationship , then played a key role in bringing to Cuba the Soviet nuclear @-@ armed ballistic missiles that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war . A few weeks after the crisis , during an interview with the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker , Guevara was still fuming over the perceived Soviet betrayal and told correspondent Sam Russell that , if the missiles had been under Cuban control , they would have fired them off . While expounding on the incident later , Guevara reiterated that the cause of socialist liberation against global " imperialist aggression " would ultimately have been worth the possibility of " millions of atomic war victims " . The missile crisis further convinced Guevara that the world 's two superpowers ( the United States and the Soviet Union ) used Cuba as a pawn in their own global strategies . Afterward , he denounced the Soviets almost as frequently as he denounced the Americans . 
