The fate of the Americas: the Cuban Missile Crisis and the hemispheric Cold War

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the most studied events of the Cold War. Much of the literature has interrogated the minutiae of US and Soviet decision-making, with a subordinate role assigned to Cuba. The crisis has been treated as a highly serious but transient incident in the decades-long geopolitical confrontation. At best, only minimal attention has been devoted to the broader Latin American context, and to the varied stances of the states in the region. Renata Keller, in her outstanding new book, contends that ‘Latin America was at the heart of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the outset’, and that it represented ‘a turning point in inter-American relations’ (pp. 2–3). After all, the Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba placed almost every country in the region, not just the United States, within reach—an obvious point that is underappreciated in the voluminous historiography (p. 60). Keller has undertaken an impressive amount of multi-archival research across Latin America, as well as in the more familiar US archives; she is not dependent on the latter, as many previous scholars have been, in interpreting the diplomatic positions of Latin American countries on a multitude of issues. Keller has also consulted an array of regional periodicals, pamphlets and memoirs in order to obtain a sense of public opinion at the time. This copious research has allowed her to present a more holistic picture of Latin American attitudes prior to, during and after the missile crisis. The author has adopted a novel, overall approach to this well-worn topic. First, she contextualizes Latin America's response to the missile crisis within a broader time-frame than is conventional. Since she rightly argues that the crisis was an outgrowth of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, she begins her largely chronological narrative with the divergent reactions across the region towards the revolution that conditioned later responses to the crisis. Then, she turns to the existential threat to Cuban security that the April 1961 US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion posed; the missile crisis itself; and the impetus it provided in its aftermath to the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco that established a regional nuclear weapons-free zone—the first such zone in the world.