The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War
By Renata Keller
The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and Soviet Union closer to nuclear war than at any other point in history. Yet traditional accounts have largely portrayed the crisis as a confrontation between the two superpowers, with Cuba serving as the central staging ground.
In The Fate of the Americas, Renata Keller expands the story beyond Washington, Moscow and Havana to examine the crisis from a hemispheric perspective. She reveals how governments and ordinary citizens throughout Latin America experienced and influenced events—and how millions across the region would have faced grave danger had the missiles been activated.
Traversing the Americas from the Southern Cone to Central America, Keller recounts the deadly riots that erupted in Bolivia, the naval quarantine formed by members of Argentina’s armed forces, pro-Castro demonstrations organized by Nicaraguan students and other responses throughout the region.
Drawing on an extensive collection of archival sources from across the hemisphere and around the world, The Fate of the Americas challenges familiar narratives of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Keller demonstrates that Latin Americans were not merely bystanders to a superpower confrontation but active participants in the Cold War and the inter-American relationships it transformed.
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We are proud to partner with the Loudoun County Public Library who makes available multiple copies of this book for checkout at the Rust Library.