In October of 1962, there was the Cuban missile crisis. My enthusiasm for Fidel Castro had ended in spring of 1959 when he began to execute political opponents, which sympathetic Americans saw as an expression of revolutionary justice. We found out more clearly what was going on in Cuba politically when one of my students at Dillard, who had visited his family in Cuba during the Christmas vacation, returned shaken and told us that he had been questioned by the police for hours after he had met friends in a café. On the other hand, we felt that the economic sanctions that the United States had imposed on Cuba were wrong, and that the invasion in the Bay of Pigs and guerrilla attacks that were organized by the United States had practically forced Castro to turn toward the Soviet Union.
In October, everyone expected a nuclear conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. We were shocked that the majority of Americans, including our black colleagues at Dillard, supported Kennedy’s willing- ness to go to war. In New Orleans an attack on the city was considered likely. New Orleans is largely located below sea level and surrounded by dikes, so that it would be flooded if there were an attack. There were only two highways leading out of the city, so that an evacuation would have been impossible. We decided to go to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, about a hundred miles North of New Orleans, where the rabbi of the reform synagogue had offered us refuge. On the Friday evening when we were packing, we heard the news that Kennedy and Khrushchev had reached an agreement and war was averted.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 105