By Marion Lloyd, Globe Correspondent

                  HAVANA - Forty years after the United States and Cuba came to the brink
                  of nuclear war, key players in the Cuban missile crisis gathered here
                  yesterday to share secrets they hope will help avert another showdown with
                  potentially catastrophic results.
 
 

                  ''There's a lot of concern about avoiding a World War III,'' said David Welch, an
                  associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and a specialist
                  on the missile crisis.

                  Participants in the three-day conference - organized by the Cuban government, the
                  National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., and Brown University - include
                  former Kennedy administration officials and former Soviet military officers and their
                  Cuban counterparts. Fidel Castro, president of Cuba, who in October 1962 asked
                  the Soviet Union to protect his communist country against an expected US
                  invasion, is participating.

                  While the meeting is focusing on the 13-day drama, which ended when the Soviet
                  Union agreed to pull the missiles from Cuba, the parallels with a possible US war
                  on Iraq were hard to ignore.

                  ''Let's hope our leaders have learned their history and see how this was handled
                  and show caution in responding to today's crisis,'' said Wayne Smith, director of
                  the Washington-based Center for International Policy and a longtime US
                  government adviser on Cuba.

                  On Monday, President Bush justified proposed military action in Iraq by quoting
                  from a speech by President Kennedy in which Kennedy spelled out his reasons for
                  a naval quarantine of Cuba and announced the possibility of a US military attack.
                  However, former Kennedy aides said Bush had taken his predecessor's words out
                  of context by suggesting that he intended to order a preemptive strike against
                  Cuba.

                  ''This was not preemption. This was the reverse of preemption,'' said Robert
                  McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary and a key participant in the conference.
                  He said that by using the word ''quarantine'' rather than ''blockade'' to describe the
                  US-imposed ban on Soviet ships headed for Cuba, Kennedy was deliberately
                  trying to emphasize the defensive nature of US policy.

                  Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy, is also attending. She said
                  Thursday night that any unilateral attack on Iraq would run counter to US
                  principles.

                  ''It's not in our nature,'' Kennedy said. ''It's not in our history. It's not in our national
                  makeup.''

                  McNamara led the afternoon discussion, which was closed to the media, by posing
                  13 questions to Russian and Cuban participants in an effort to flesh out the missing
                  pieces of the standoff, according to participants.

                  This is the sixth time officials and historians from the three countries have met to
                  discuss the missile crisis.

                  During the previous conference, in 1992, US officials discovered that the Soviets
                  already had put tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba before the US quarantine. If
                  Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier during the crisis, had not backed down and
                  agreed to remove the missiles, Kennedy would have been forced to attack, almost
                  certainly unleashing a full-scale nuclear war.

                  Although there have been no such bombshells at the current conference, a former
                  Soviet military official surprised participants by describing how Castro had urged
                  the Soviets to come clean on their plans to install missiles in Cuba. Castro even
                  dispatched Che Guevara, a fellow revolutionary leader, to Moscow to lobby
                  Khrushchev.

                  ''The Cubans said the mistake was installing missiles secretly,'' the military official
                  was quoted as saying in a press briefing during yesterday's sessions.

                  ''That would have tied our hands,'' said Theodore Sorensen, a key policy adviser
                  and speechwriter for President Kennedy. He said the Soviet Union could have
                  justified the move by arguing that it was responding to Washington's decision to put
                  missiles in Turkey, within striking range of the Soviet Union.

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