Creating a Third World: Mexico, Cuba, and the United States during the Castro Era (review)

In this fine first monograph, Christopher M. White describes a distinctive relationship among Mexico, Cuba, and the United States during the Cold War and shows how the two lesser players retained a measure of agency in spite of the overall dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union. Taking an unconventional approach, the author argues that Third World leaders seldom displayed mere passivity in their dealings with Washington and Moscow. Typically, they had “their own Cold War agendas” for purposes of defending national interests and ideals. Though often influenced by “superpower friends” in Washington and Moscow, the leaders in Mexico City and Havana usually exercised some independence from outside control.

The main themes focus on the complexity of relations within a trilateral context and emphasize the impact of the Cold War, resulting sometimes in dual or cross purposes. For example, although Mexico and the United States took positions in opposition to the expansion of Cuban communism, Mexico nevertheless retained formal diplomatic ties with Cuba in the 1960s when the rest of Latin America followed the U.S. lead by severing them. Indeed, left-leaning leaders in each country celebrated the legacies of their joint commitment to nonintervention, self-determinations, and social justice—but not without resistance. Unsurprisingly, anti-communist Cuban exiles together with right-wing Mexicans denounced this elicit embrace, and the politicians and intellectuals who sustained it.

White allows that the idea of a special relationship has some validity. Bound in close proximity by geography and history, Mexico and Cuba also share an anti-colonial, pro-revolutionary past personified in recent times by Fidel Castro and Lázaro Cárdenas, who formed a mutual admiration society in the years after 1959 while affirming group solidarity against Yankee imperialism. At the same time, White argues that “togetherness” became exaggerated while taking on an “imaginary” quality. To be sure, the notion enhanced the legitimacy, authority, and prestige of the Mexican and Cuban revolutions but also “reconstructed” the past based on present needs. For example, the PRI usually supported bonds with Cuba based on historical precedent, while the PAN has opposed Castro since he came to power. The author sees a parallel with Benedict Anderson’s conception of “imagined communities” according to which in this instance “the convenient yet spurious nature of the Mexican-Cuban ‘special friendship’” took shape by promulgating an “anti-imperialist, revolutionary rhetoric of mutual affiliation throughout a history of ‘resistance’ to ‘oppression.’” (pp. 15–16).

A countervailing discourse among Mexicans and Cubans mirrored the views of anti-communists in the United States. While linking Castro with Soviet subversion, neo-McCarthyites and other such types downplayed Third World nationalism as an explanation, depicted proponents as communist dupes, and lamented the violation of “human rights” as an intolerable fault. According to White, the influence of such thinking showed up in various ways, for example, in the middle 1960s when the Mexican government under President Adolfo López Mateo used its diplomatic presence in Cuba as a means of collecting information for the United States. So it goes with Cold War surrealism in which many things differed from what they seemed.

This book brings clarity to a complicated set of international relationships and shows how double games became a characteristic in the midst of competing goals during the Cold War. It also underscores the degree of “agency” exercised by Mexico and Cuba and thereby serves as a corrective to those accounts emphasizing Third World dependencies. In many instances, the two superpowers could not simply impose their will. White has written an illuminating work while employing appropriate conceptual apparatus based on archival materials and other materials available to him in Mexico City, Havana, and Washington, D.C. His work effectively reveals a regional subset of international relations within the larger Cold War context. It should interest both specialists and generalists.