The Penguin History of the World

A new and much more explicit phase of the Cold War then began in the western hemisphere, and began badly for the United States. The American initiative incurred disapproval everywhere because it was an attack on a popular, solidly based regime. Henceforth, Cuba was a magnet for Latin American revolutionaries. Castro’s regime turned increasingly towards the Soviet model and his government pressed forward with policies that, together with American pressure, badly damaged the economy, but embodied egalitarianism and social reform (already in the 1970s, Cuba claimed to have the lowest child mortality rates in Latin America).

As a by-product of the Cuban revolution, there soon took place the most serious great power confrontation of the whole Cold War and perhaps its turning-point. In early 1962 Khrushchev decided to install Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, in part to defend the Cuban revolution and in part to gain a strategic advantage against the United States. The Americans already had their missiles in countries bordering the Soviet Union, Khrushchev told his colleagues; now the impulsive Soviet leader would cock a snook at the Americans while reassuring his revolutionary friends around the world that the USSR was the real friend of revolution, whatever their Chinese detractors said. Thus began a dangerous game, which by October 1962 saw Soviet nuclear warheads secretly placed in Cuba, along with medium-range missiles that could deliver them anywhere in the continental United States.

American photographic reconnaissance confirmed in October 1962 that the Soviets were building missile sites in Cuba. President Kennedy waited until this could be shown to be incontrovertible and then announced that the United States Navy would stop any ship delivering further missiles to Cuba and that those already in Cuba would have to be withdrawn. One Lebanese ship was boarded and searched in the days that followed; Soviet ships were only observed. The American nuclear strike force was prepared for war. After a few days and some exchanges of personal letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the latter agreed that the missiles should be removed.

This crisis by far transcended the history of the hemisphere, and its repercussions outside it are best discussed elsewhere. So far as Latin American history is concerned, even though the United States promised not to invade Cuba, it went on trying to isolate it as much as possible from its neighbours. Unsurprisingly, the appeal of Cuba’s revolution nevertheless seemed for a while to gain ground among the young of other Latin American countries. This did not make their governments more sympathetic towards Castro, especially when he began to talk of Cuba as a revolutionary centre for the rest of the continent. In the event, as an unsuccessful attempt in Bolivia showed, revolution was not likely to prove easy. Cuban circumstances had been very atypical. The hopes entertained of mounting peasant rebellion elsewhere proved illusory. Local Communists in other countries deplored Castro’s efforts. Potential recruits and materials for revolution turned out to be on the whole urban rather than rural, and middle class rather than peasants; it was in the major cities that guerrilla movements were within a few years making the headlines. Despite being spectacular and dangerous, it is not clear that they enjoyed wide popular support, even if the brutalities practised in dealing with them alienated support from authoritarian governments in some countries.

Anti-Americanism meanwhile continued to run high. Kennedy’s hopes for a new American initiative, based on social reform – an ‘Alliance for Progress’ as he termed it – made no headway against the animosity aroused by American treatment of Cuba. His successor as president, Lyndon Johnson, did no better, perhaps because he was less interested in Latin America than in domestic reform. The initiative was never recaptured after the initial flagging of the Alliance. Worse still, it was overtaken in 1965 by a fresh example of the old Adam of intervention, this time in the Dominican Republic, where, four years before, American help had assisted the overthrow and assassination of a corrupt and tyrannical dictator and his replacement by a reforming democratic government. When this was pushed aside by soldiers acting in defence of the privileged, who felt threatened by reform, the Americans cut off aid; it looked as if, after all, the Alliance for Progress might be used discriminately. But aid was soon restored – as it was to other right-wing regimes. A rebellion against the soldiers in 1965 resulted in the arrival of 20,000 American troops to put it down.