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  • In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War
  • Brian Loveman
Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser , eds., In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 456 pp. $26.95.

In the two decades since 1990, newly opened archives, new memoirs, and revisionist research have begun to provide a more centripetal history of the not-so-Cold War for much of the planet. In from the Cold is an eclectic, multidisciplinary collection of essays ranging from theoretical considerations of Cold War history and scholarship to microstudies of California farm workers, birth control pills and gendered authoritarianism in Brazil, and culture wars in central Mexico—each essay a fragment of a collective effort to construct a "more multilayered and multivocal history of the Latin American Cold War" (p. vii). Divided into three parts, "New Approaches, Debates and Sources," "Latin America between the Superpowers," and "Everyday Contests over Culture and Representation in the Latin American Cold War," the volume provides valuable guidance into new sources of documentation (especially declassified material from the United States, the Soviet Union, and Latin America), reconsiders "what was being fought over" in the Latin American Cold War by Latin Americans and the superpowers, and offers interpretations of the politico-cultural manifestations of the Cold War in the region.

In from the Cold combines revisionist looks at master narratives of the Cold War in Latin America and new "bottom up" tales of Latin America in the Cold War—efforts "to reconstruct the social histories and memories of the followers of both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, as well as of men and women on the margins and in the interstices of both" (p. 29). In some ways, the book is reminiscent of Barton J. Bernstein's edited volume Towards a New Past, published in 1968; The volume takes stock of existing historiography and criticizes liberal Cold War policymakers, labor leaders, and historians (e.g., Jessee Lemisch, who insisted on "history from the bottom-up," and Christopher Lasch, who discussed the "cultural cold war") for acquiescence in the American imperium in the name of anti-Communism.

Just as the Bernstein volume reflected on American historiography and history from the 1780s to the 1960s, Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser reframe and reconsider "what we know and what we should know" about Latin America and U.S.-Latin American relations during the Cold War. Thomas Blanton's "Recovering the Memory of the Cold War" discusses important new historical sources, including Latin America's truth commissions since the end of military rule and the impressive declassification project of the National Security Archive (which Blanton has directed), gathering materials from Guatemala to the Southern Cone and Paraguay's Archive of Terror, among others. Blanton's chapter is an excellent beginning for a volume focused on new historical detective work. The release of previously secret material (heavily censored in some cases) challenges researchers around the planet to weave together both a more global and a more local history of the period from 1945 to 1990. A brief discussion of the interaction between international human rights activism, Latin American [End Page 190] truth commissions, and the declassification of documents in the United States that bear on Cold War history prompt Blanton's call for a new comparative social and political history of the Cold War era in the Western Hemisphere—and elsewhere. Blanton emphasizes the opportunities now available for such an international history project. At the same time, like Gilbert Joseph in the introductory chapter, Blanton reminds readers of Latin America's crucial role in the Cold War story, a role often ignored by mainline diplomatic historians.

Part II treats the Caribbean (especially Cuba) and Argentina, with chapters by Daniela Spenser, Piero Gleijeses, and Ariel Armony. The three chapters flow together methodologically, substantively, and thematically. Spenser frames "the Caribbean crisis" with a new look at the Cuban missile crisis and its consequences for Soviet policy toward Latin America. Then, relying on newly available archives and secondary accounts from Soviet, Cuban, and East European archives, Spenser analyzes the vacillating and alternating Soviet support for, and opposition to, armed struggle in the...

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