Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:38:30.496Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

America's Cuban Obsession: A Case Study in Diplomacy and Psycho-History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Edward Cuddy*
Affiliation:
Daemen College, Amherst, New York

Extract

No more Cubas!” For a quarter of a century, that slogan has propelled American intervention into Latin America. President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress was designed to head off more Castro-type revolutions in the region. In 1965, President Johnson crushed a revolution in the Dominican Republic, declaring that “another Cuba in this hemisphere would be unacceptable.” And the Nixon plan for subverting the Chilean government in the early 1970s was motivated, in Henry Kissinger's words, by fear of Allende's “patent intention to create another Cuba.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 “Report on Central America,” New York Times, January 12, 1984.

2 Crozier, Brian, “The Caribbean Scourge,” National Review, 35, September 2, 1983, 1062.Google Scholar

3 Khrushchev, Nikita, Khrushchev Remembers (New York, 1970), pp. 540–1.Google Scholar

4 Gonzalez, Edward, “The United States and Castro: Breaking the Deadlock,” Foreign Affairs, 50: July 1972, 722–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Khrushchev, p. 546.

6 Dominguez, Jorge I., “Cuban Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, 57: Fall 1978, 83108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Ibid., 83–108.

8 Reston, James, “Mexico City,” New York Times, December 12, 1962.Google Scholar

9 Donaldson, Robert H., “The Soviet Union in the Third World,” Current History, 81: October 1982, 313–17, 339.Google Scholar

10 Carter, Jimmy, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York, 1982), p. 254.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 256.

12 Dominguez, pp. 83–108.

13 Woodward, C. Vann, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1966), p. xii.Google Scholar

14 Serban, George, The Tyranny of Magical Thinking (New York, 1982), p. 36.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., p. 103.

16 Quoted in Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., “Foreign Policy and the American Character,” Foreign Affairs, 62: Fall 1983, 116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Lernoux, Penny, “U.S.’s ‘big stick’ policy hits tiny isle of Grenada,” National Catholic Reporter, November 4, 1983, 24.Google Scholar

18 Serban, pp. 29, 30, 31, 190, 191.

19 Lernoux, p. 24.

20 Quoted in Ambrose, Stephen E., Rise to Globalism (New York, 1982, 2nd rev. ed.), p. 240.Google Scholar

21 Steel, Ronald, “Kissinger is Skilled in Working the Dark Side of Nation’s Ambitions,” Buffalo News, July 31, 1983.Google Scholar

22 Ullman, Richard H., “At War With Nicaragua,” Foreign Affairs, 62: Fall 1983, 3958.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Ibid.

24 Lowenthal, Abraham, “Ronald Reagan and Latin America: Coping With Hegemony in Decline;” in Oye, Kenneth A., et. al., eds.. Eagle Defiant (Boston, 1983), p. 325.Google Scholar See also Ebel, Roland H., “Political Instability in Central America,” Current History, 81: February 1982, 5659, 86.Google Scholar

25 Serban, p. 30.

26 Ullman, loc. cit.

27 Johnson, Robert H., “Periods of Peril,” Foreign Affairs, 61: Spring, 1983, pp. 950–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Serban, p. 185.

29 Quoted from Patrick Morgan in Johnson, loc. cit.

30 Serban, pp. 192–93, 197–98.

31 A Gallup poll taken during the Summer, 1983, indicated that 72 per cent of the American people believed that American intervention could change El Salvador into another Vietnam. Americans opposed military aid to Central America, 55 per cent to 35 per cent.