Beyond the Eagle's Shadow: New Histories of Latin America's Cold War

3: Season of Storms: The United States and the Caribbean Contest for a New Political Order, 1958–1961

76 · Chapter Three · Season of Storms The United States and the Caribbean Contest for a New Political Order, 1958–1961 5 Aragorn Storm Miller Throughout most of the 1950s, U.S. policymakers enjoyed relative success in insulating the Western Hemisphere from the ideological tensions of the Cold War, and U.S. allies in the region managed to maintain local politics within contours established decades earlier. Beginning in 1958, however, a new generation of Latin American leaders challenged this status quo. This challenge manifested itself most prominently in the Caribbean basin, where Venezuela’s Romulo Betancourt and Cuba’s Fidel Castro helped overthrow dictators allied with the United States in an effort to establish governments responsive to their own populations. In response, the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo arose as the key conservative—even reactionary—antagonist to Betancourt and Castro. This rivalry sprang from long-running personal animosity and from critical disagreements over the meanings of capitalism and communism, debates that naturally invoked the currents of the global Cold War. Recognizing the ascendance of democratic reform and the obsolescence of dictatorial rule, but unable to defuse the Caribbean crisis, the United States increasingly aligned itself with Betancourt, who appeared to be the best prospect for centrist leadership Season of Storms 77 independent of Castro’s and Trujillo’s excesses. As the 1960s dawned, the relative intimacy and harmony of the Washington-Caracas partnership played a key role in ensuring that economic and political development in the hemisphere occurred within a pro-U.S. context. This partnership stabilized and reshaped Caribbean—and by extension hemispheric—politics by moderating ascendant left-wing reform, strengthening international security organs such as the Organization of American States (OAS), and crippling the power of right-wing reactionaries. This chapter corroborates recent historiographical trends emphasizing the unusually strong influence of the developing world in U.S. Cold War policymaking by delving into a crucial yet undertreated dimension of hemispheric politics. In the mid-1990s scholars such as Stephen Rabe and Michael Hall spearheaded the reconsideration of the role of Latin America in the Cold War, judging that Latin American leaders often played important roles in shaping the way the Cold War unfolded in the hemisphere. As Max Paul Friedman neatly puts it, this new historiography sought to “strike a balance by acknowledging the enormous impact of the Western Hemisphere’s only superpower without ignoring the role of Latin Americans in shaping their own history.”1 Building on such contributions, scholars like Hal Brands have further showcased the independent thought and agency of Latin Americans, arguing that local leaders acted as more than simple tools for, or students of, the so-called superpowers. In many cases, runs this line of reasoning, these leaders often conceived and executed their own policy prescriptions without seeking the advice or consent of the superpowers.2 This inquiry takes such ideas further, examining the exercise of agency within a fresh context and pushing beyond the notion that the Cold War in the Americas involved simple binaries of “right” or “left,” intervention or cooperation. The argument is that Latin American agency was heterogeneous and constantly shifting, such that Latin Americans debated among themselves over what it meant to be independent or associated with various global powers and political trends. Latin American agency sometimes meant opposition to U.S. policy and a quest for autonomy, but just as often it meant a fluid internal struggle over the meaning and purpose of such autonomy and efforts to forge fresh ties with various powerbrokers in Washington and across the Atlantic. There was an attractive principle to public criticism of Uncle Sam, to be sure, but savvy and pragmatic Latin American leaders recognized that the United States and Europe had much to offer, and that many within the U.S. and European foreign relations Aragorn Storm Miller 78 community were eager to accommodate themselves to new political trends emanating from the region. The sort of disagreements introduced above—in this case between Cuba, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic—forced Washington into an uncomfortable position as mediator and judge. U.S. policymakers worked to placate and punish, court and confound, these governments, all the while reckoning whether their ideological and political positions represented capitalism , communism, pure nationalism, or some combination of the three. Often paying little attention to Washington, the Caribbean leaders—at the state and nonstate level—developed various political aspirations and alignments for their own nations...