Introduction: The Cuban Revolution
and Latin America
“January 1, 1959, when Fidel Castro triumphed, began a new era in Latin
Amer i ca.” So wrote New York Times senior editor Herbert Matthews, a close
observer of Fidel Castro’s guerrilla war against dictator Fulgencio Batista.1
Echoing Matthews’ words, dozens of academic and journalistic studies
written in the 1960s proclaimed the Cuban Revolution a major watershed
in Latin America’s history.
The six decades since Castro’s victory have marginalized Cuba from the
Latin American mainstream. As a result, it may appear from today’s per-
spective that the Cuban Revolution had been an exotic, aberrant growth
on the Latin American body politic. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The
Cuban Revolution owed its vast influence in Latin America to the fact
that—most evidently in its early years—it embodied the aspirations and
captured the imagination of Latin America’s masses as no other political
movement had ever done.
Beginning with the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Latin America wit-
nessed the rise of reformist and revolutionary forces dedicated to better-
ing the material condition of the workers, the dark peoples, the poor, the
illiterate, the exploited—those who lived their lives on the margin of soci-
ety and outside the realm of politics. Mexico’s revolutionary 1917 consti-
tution not only set goals for Mexico, but its commitment to political
democracy, social justice, and national liberation from foreign economic
dominance—in sum, to freedom and human dignity—also set the agenda
for 20th-century Latin American politics. Following the Mexican Revolu-
tion, mass movements such as Peru’s American Popular Revolutionary Alli-
ance (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, APRA) and Venezuela’s