On October 28, 1962, Nikita Khrushchev announced over Moscow radio that the Soviet missiles that had been sent to Cuba would be dismantled and taken away, and the crisis that had begun on October 14 with the discovery of the sites by an American spy aircraft came to an end after thirteen days. The announcement was made without consulting the Cuban government, which was angry at the decision. The risk was great. The ships carrying the missiles turned back.
The crisis had grown very close to war. President John F. Kennedy had announced a naval blockade of the island on October 22 and demanded the removal of the missiles, and Soviet ships approached the line and then stopped, and an American reconnaissance aircraft was shot down over Cuba on October 27, and the joint chiefs pressed for an invasion. The two sides exchanged messages, and the settlement was worked out through a mixture of public statements and private assurances. The danger was real. The terms were that the missiles would go and that the United States would not invade Cuba.
A second part of the bargain was kept quiet at the time. The United States agreed to remove its own missiles from Turkey, which were old and were due to be replaced, but the arrangement was not made public so that it would not look like a trade. The Soviet side was also given an assurance about the security of Cuba. The missiles were loaded onto ships in the following weeks and the sites were inspected.
The crisis changed the thinking on both sides. A direct telephone line between Washington and Moscow, the so called hot line, was set up in 1963 so that the two leaders could speak quickly in an emergency, and the two countries signed the limited test ban treaty in the same year, and the experience was studied for decades as an example of how a confrontation can be managed. The war was avoided. Cuba remained a close ally of the Soviet Union.