xvi Introduction: The Cuban Revolution and Latin Amer­i­ca
that high point, fulfillment of the revolution’s promises became increasingly
selective: po­liti­cal democracy was in­def­i nitely postponed, then discarded,
as Castro embraced Communism; individual liberties ­ were subordinated
to social justice for the collective; and ­ after the first de­cade, growing
dependence on the Soviet Union compromised the quest for Cuban sov-
ereignty. Yet Cuban influence remained strong for many years, long ­ after
failures began to tarnish the revolution’s image, ­ because for many Latin
Americans the hope and the example that the Cuban Revolution provided
in its youth transcended the shortcomings of its ­ later years.
The Cuban Revolution was responsible not only for the revolutionary
ferment that spread across Latin Amer­i­ca. ­Because it posed an existential
threat to Latin Amer­ i ­ ca’s elites and to U.S. economic and geopo­liti­cal inter-
ests, that wave of revolution created a power­ful wave of reaction that
engulfed the region. Supported by the United States, the militaries took
power in all but four Latin American countries in the 1960s and 1970s
and instituted severe repression against advocates of reform or revolution
that, in several instances, reached the level of state terrorism. Uncon-
strained by constitutions that protected ­ human rights, the militaries
harassed, exiled, jailed, tortured, murdered, and dis­appeared hundreds of
thousands of ­people in their quest to exterminate ­those they considered
Communists or simply “subversives.”
This book offers an interpretation of the era of the Cuban Revolution, the
period when the forces of change that first burst forth in the Mexican Revo-
lution of 1910 mounted an all-­out challenge to the status quo in Latin
Amer­ i ­ ca—­ a time when the threat or hope of reform and revolution was
never stronger. This was also the period of the most extreme reaction in
Latin Amer­ i ­ ca’s history—­ a period that witnessed the institutionalization of
dictatorships and repression that extinguished democracy and ­human
rights. This era that began with Fidel Castro’s triumph in 1959 lasted
through three de­cades ­ until global forces and developments within Latin
Amer­ i ­ ca signaled its end in 1990.
In arguing that the Cuban Revolution dictated the broad sweep of Latin
American politics for some 30 years, I am not advancing a single-­cause
explanation of the po­liti­cal life of a huge and diverse area. Clearly, the mobi-
lizations and the revolutionary movements that swept the hemi­sphere
beginning in 1959 had indigenous roots. They sprang from the poverty
and social inequities that characterized Latin Amer­i­ca and from the
efforts of preexisting po­liti­cal forces advocating reform and revolution.
Castro certainly did not create revolutionary ferment from thin air;
but by its example, reinforced by Castro’s ambitious efforts to promote
insurrection throughout Latin Amer­i­ca, the Cuban Revolution served as a
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