The Fate of the Americas

The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War

Renata Keller

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469686639
• Print ISBN:
  9781469689432
  9781469689425
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History

Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for postwar domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground—a standard account that obscures the shock waves that reverberated throughout Latin America. This first hemispheric examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis shows how leaders and ordinary citizens throughout the region experienced it, revealing that, had the missiles been activated, millions of people across Latin America would have been at grave risk.

Traversing the region from the Southern Cone to Central America, Renata Keller describes the deadly riots that shook Bolivia when news of the Cuban Missile Crisis broke, the naval quarantine that members of Argentina’s armed forces formed around Cuba, the pro-Castro demonstrations organized by Nicaraguan students, and much more. Drawing on a vast array of archival sources from around the hemisphere and world, The Fate of the Americas demonstrates that even at the brink of destruction, Latin Americans played active roles in global politics and inter-American relations.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Halftitlea
• Map
• Introduction
• Part I. Causes
• 1 Revolution and Reaction
• 2 Counterrevolution and Containment
• Part II. Crisis
• 3 Decisions
• 4 First Responders
• 5 Hemispheric Security
• 6 Homeland Security
• 7 War of Words
• 8 Explosions
• 9 Climax
• Part III. Consequences
• 10 Crisis Averted or Crisis Prolonged?
• 11 Realignments
• 12 Fallout
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index