Conclusion

From the 1950s to the 1980s Latin America’s place in the Cold War vacillated between being seemingly peripheral to being crucially central. And yet one of the ironies of Cold War history is that this continent, which was so far removed from the initial causes of the East-West confrontation, not only became one of its ‘hottest’ battlegrounds in the early 1980s, but still hosts one of the few surviving communist regimes in the world.

In meeting what it perceived as the communist challenge in Latin America, the United States responded essentially in one of two ways. At one extreme it launched a series of interventions aimed at toppling undesirable governments. With two exceptions, the 1965 landing of marines in the Dominican Republic by the Johnson administration and the Reagan administration’s intervention on the small island of Grenada in 1982, these were covert operations. In 1954 the CIA helped train and provide logistical support for the overthrow of the leftist government of Arbenz in Guatemala; in 1961 it attempted but failed miserably in a similar effort in Cuba; between 1970 and 1973 it worked hard to destabilize the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile; and in the 1980s the Reagan administration provided support for right-wing guerrillas in Central America.

While such interventions were often counter-productive or produced only short-term successes, American administrations also tried to use economic aid and the building of hemispheric institutional structures to counter the appeal of left­wing causes and anti-American sentiments. Perhaps most notably, in the early 1960s the Kennedy administration launched the Alliance for Progress, an ambitious programme using a combination of American economic aid and matching Latin American efforts that was designed to combat the economic and social problems in the target countries.

Of all the countries in Latin America, it was Cuba that caused the greatest problem for US administrations. Under Fidel Castro, Cuba symbolized many of the failures of previous American policies and posed a constant, if at times exaggerated, challenge to its influence in the region. From the US perspective Cuba provided a base for Soviet operations in the Western Hemisphere, served as a ‘model’ for other revolutionaries, and acted as an active exporter of revolutionary ideas to countries as distant as Nicaragua and Chile. Indeed, one of the notable ‘successes’ of US covert action in Latin America in the 1960s was the assassina­tion of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. There is no question that the Soviet Union took a special interest in seeing the Cuban Revolution, and Fidel Castro, succeed. Yet the Soviet-Cuban relationship was never one of complete dependency, some­thing that in part explains the survival of Castro’s regime beyond the Cold War. Since the early 1990s, though, Cuba’s economic troubles have multiplied and the country has increasingly been forced to rely on such ‘capitalist’ industries as tourism in order to obtain the hard currency necessary to purchase foreign imports.

As the Guatemalan, Cuban, Chilean and Nicaraguan cases in particular indicate, Latin American peoples were hardly content with being passive subjects of American foreign policy. In various ways, both violently and peacefully, political movements in a number of South and Central American countries tried to find ways of reducing their economic dependency on the United States. Their problem was that in the context of the Cold War, the only country that could provide a significant external balance to the American dominance was the Soviet Union.

Recommended reading

The best recent overview of US-Latin American relations that pays due attention to developments and policies throughout the Western Hemisphere is Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of US—Latin American Relations (New York, 2000). Some of the other recent overviews of US policy towards Latin America during the Cold War include John H. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States: The Clients and the Colossus (New York, 1994), R. H. Holden and E. Zolov, Latin America and the United States (New York, 2000), John J. Johnson, A Hemisphere Apart: The Foundations of United States Policy toward Latin America (Baltimore, MD, 1990), Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York, 1983), Lester D. Langley, The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century (Athens, GA, 1982), Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History ofUS Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA, 1998) and Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine (New York,

1993). For a somewhat outdated account of the Soviet role, see Cole Blasier, The Giant’s Rival: The USSR and Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA, 1988).

The Latin American perspective is assessed in such works as Pope Atkins, Latin America in the International Political System (Boulder, CO, 1989), Paul Drake (ed.), Money Doctors, Foreign Debts, and Economic Reforms in Latin America from the 1890s to the Present (Wilmington, DE, 1994), Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Cambridge, MA, 1994), Jennie Lincoln and Elizabeth Ferris, Latin American Foreign Policies: Global and Regional Dimensions (Boulder, CO, 1981) and Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith, Modern Latin America (New York, 1996).

On Guatemala, see Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944—1954 (Princeton, NJ, 1991) and Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala (Austin, TX, 1982). For a broader assessment of US—Latin American relations in the 1950s, see Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988).

On the Cuban Revolution and its impact, see Jules R. Benjamin, The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution: An Empire of Liberty in an Age of National Liberation (Princeton, NJ, 1990) and Thomas Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York,

1994). On the Bay of Pigs, see Thomas Higgins, The Perfect Failure (New York, 1987). An overall account of Castro's Cuban foreign policy is Jorge Dominguez, Making the World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA, 1989). A good study assessing the impact of the Cuban Revolution on the rest of Latin America is Thomas Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution (Westport, CT, 2001). An older account, with a more ‘realist' perspective, is Cole Blasier, The Hovering Giant: US Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA, 1986).

Some early accounts of the Alliance for Progress include Jerome Lewinson and Juan de Onis, The Alliance that Lost its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress (Chicago, 1970) and William D. Rogers, The Twilight Struggle: The Alliance for Progress and the Politics of Development in Latin America (New York, 1967). A more recent version with numerous insights is Ronald Scheman (ed.), The Alliance for Progress: A Retrospective (New York, 1988). For a study that puts the Alliance in the broader context of ‘modernization theory', see Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). For general assessments of Kennedy's policy towards the region, see Edward Martin, Kennedy and Latin America (Lanham, MD, 1994) and Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999).

American interventions from the 1960s to the present have produced numerous studies. The 1965 Dominican intervention is treated in Abraham Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (Cambridge, MA, 1972) and Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican Crises: The 1965 Constitutionalist Revolt and American Intervention (Baltimore, MD, 1978). Events in Chile are covered in Nathaniel Davis, The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende (Ithaca, NY, 1985), Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide (London, 2005) and Paul Sigmund, The United States and Democracy in Chile (Baltimore, MD, 1993). For post-Allende Chile, see Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile under Pinochet (Baltimore, MD, 1991) and Peter Kornbluh (ed.), The Pinochet File (New York, 2005).

The last decade of the Cold War is covered in Thomas Carothers, In the Name of Democracy: US Policy toward Latin America in the Reagan Years (Berkeley, CA, 1991), Roy Gutman, Banana Diplomacy (New York, 1987), Anthony Lake, Somoza Falling (Boston, CO, 1989), Thomas Walker, Revolution and Counter­revolution in Nicaragua (Boulder, CO, 1990), Thomas Walker (ed.), Reagan vs. the Sandinistas (Boulder, 1987) and William Leogrande, Our Own Backyard (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998).

For the post-Cold War era see Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America (New York, 2002), R. H. Holden and E. Zolov, Latin America and the United States (New York, 2000) and Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York, 2006). On the impact of Hugo Chavez, see Richard Gott, Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution (New York, 2005) and Nikolas Kozloff, Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the US (London, 2006).