REVIEW: “The shadows of the Cold War over Latin America: the US reaction to Fidel Castro’s Nationalism, 1956-1959”

For scholars of US policies in the Cold War, the question of where to situate Latin America in any overarching narrative is a complex one. Neither wholly unimportant nor at the forefront of overt Cold War concerns, the region often existed in a state of flux – caught somewhere between the wider constructs of the Cold War and, equally important, a wider pattern of the region’s constituent nations seeking to forge their own paths through the maelstrom of the second half of the twentieth century. At times, the Cold War seemed to be at the fore in the Americas. At other times, though, the presence of east-west tensions was much less manifest. Some scholars, in fact, have even gone as far as to question whether or not the Cold War ever really came to the region. Contextualising and determining the reasons behind US policy, then, has remained difficult with respect to Latin America, especially in the period between 1945 and 1962. Attempts to explain the US approach towards the region, nevertheless, have tended to focus on three explanatory frameworks: first, the imposition of dominant Cold War considerations onto the region by myopic US officials; second, the overwhelming desire of the US to secure its hegemonic position in the area that has its roots in the much longer history of inter-American relations; and third, the impact that the role and actions of the Latin American nations themselves had on the course of intra-hemispheric relations.