Feb.
7, 1963 - President Kennedy said today that the presence of Soviet forces in Cuba was “unfinished business” with Moscow.
However, he rejected suggestions that those forces were now an offensive threat to the nations of the hemisphere.
Mr. Kennedy said he was still trying to obtain from Premier Khrushchev a definition of his promise to withdraw Soviet combat forces in “due course.” In the meantime, he urged critics in Congress and in the press to “keep a sense of proportion of what we are talking about.” The “difficult and desperate conditions” throughout Latin America made the other American nations the “most critical” area of the world today, he said, quite apart from the “tarnished” figure of Premier Fidel Castro and the Soviet forces in Cuba.
“These are the main problems to which we ought to be paying attention,” the President declared.