Trade, Aid, and the Cold War in the Americas

2018 ◽  
pp. 13-49
Author(s):  
Thomas Tunstall Allcock

This chapter explores Thomas Mann’s career in the State Department in the period prior to Johnson’s presidency, establishing both Mann’s background and beliefs and the broad pattern of inter-American relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mann’s role as an early champion of increased economic aid and cooperative measures to assist the economies of the hemisphere is vital for understanding the positions he would later advocate in the 1960s, as is his highly successful period serving as Kennedy’s ambassador to Mexico. The chapter also traces the gradual shift from the Eisenhower administration’s “trade-not-aid” position to early efforts at promoting economic modernization, supported by Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, as the Cold War came to Latin America via Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution. It concludes with the culmination of this process, the creation of John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.

Author(s):  
Michelle Chase

Abstract This article examines the transnational activism of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (Revolutionary Student Directorate, DRE), a group of exiled Cuban anti-Castro students. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, with CIA funding, the DRE attempted to challenge student support for the Cuban Revolution in Latin America and elsewhere in the global South. This article uses the DRE's trajectory to rethink the 1960s as a period of anti-communist, as well as leftist, youth ascendancy. It challenges the idea that Cuba garnered universal youth support, stressing instead that the Cuban Revolution helped turn student politics into a key battleground of the Cold War.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 358-371
Author(s):  
Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer

AbstractThe main aim of this article is to show how the political evolution of Western and Eastern Europe during the Cold War cannot be fully understood without analysing the political experiences of countries like Spain, which were not at the centre of the period's political decisions but whose evolution was inspired and suggested by strategies outside the political mainstream. In this respect, the internal evolution of Francoist Spain from the mid-1950s through the 1960s portrays a peculiar political situation demonstrating the capillarity of political and social experiences across the Iron Curtain in Europe and Latin America. A minority of influential sectors linked to the Single Spanish Party, the Falange, pursued its own third way, ignoring the Cold War models. They instead looked to what was happening in Eastern Bloc countries, especially after the events in Hungary in 1956, as well as to the political experiments in Latin America, especially the Cuban revolution.


Author(s):  
Iñigo García-Bryce

This chapter explores Haya’s changing relationship with the United States. As an exiled student leader he denounced “Yankee imperialism” and alarmed observers in the U.S. State Department. Yet once he entered Peruvian politics, Haya understood the importance of cultivating U.S.-Latin American relations. While in hiding he maintained relations with U.S. intellectuals and politicians and sought U.S. support for his embattled party. His writings increasingly embraced democracy and he maneuvered to position APRA as an ally in the U.S. fight fascism during the 1930s and 40s, and then communism during the Cold War. The five years he spent in Lima’s Colombian embassy awaiting the resolution of his political asylum case, made him into an international symbol of the democratic fight against dictatorship. He would always remain a critic of U.S. support for dictatorships in Latin America.


2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 36-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Holland

As a wealthy American businessman and former ambassador, William Pawley was a key actor in PBSUCCESS, the covert operation that brought down the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954.The anti-Arbenz rebels, led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, could not have defeated the Guatemalan army on their own. The key to a successful coup was getting the army to act on their behalf, and in this regard, control of the air was vital. Pawley, owing to his knowledge of Latin America and experience in aviation, played a central role in ensuring that the rebels enjoyed air superiority during their move against the president. At a more abstract level, Pawley exempli fied the role non-governmental actors played in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. The “state-private network,” as it has been dubbed, remains a rich vein for scholarly investigation.


2018 ◽  
pp. 185-202 ◽  

This chapter examines the inter-relationship of sport and diplomacy with specific reference to the 1960 Winter Olympic Games (held in Squaw Valley, California). More specifically, it evaluates State Department involvement in the ongoing issue of the recognition of the “Two China’s” during the Cold War, with specific reference to international sport. Despite long-standing official non-involvement in international sporting matters, hosting the 1960 Games focussed US diplomatic attention on the opportunities and problems presented by the Olympics within the wider Cold War. Crucially, the State Department extended considerable behind-the-scenes efforts both before and during the Squaw Valley Games in an attempt ensure Nationalist Chinese participation. Overall, this chapter will demonstrate that despite claims of non-involvement, the State Department specifically utilised international sport – and particularly the Olympics – as a tool of diplomacy during the Cold War. This was drawn into particularly sharp focus when the Games were being hosted on American soil, as they were in Squaw Valley in 1960.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIELLE FOSLER-LUSSIER

AbstractFrom January to May 1965 the University of Michigan Jazz Band traveled extensively in Latin America for the State Department's Cultural Presentations Program. This tour serves as a case study through which we can see the far-reaching effects of cultural diplomacy. The State Department initially envisioned its cultural and informational programs as one-way communication that brought ideas from the United States to new places; yet the tours changed not only audiences, but also the musicians themselves and even the communities to which the musicians returned. Both archival and oral history evidence indicate that the Michigan jazz band's tour succeeded in building vital imagined connections across international borders. The nature of these connections demonstrates that the cold war practice of pushing culture across borders for political purposes furthered cultural globalization—even though the latter process is often regarded by scholars as a phenomenon that began only after the end of the cold war. The jazz band's tour highlights the essential role of music and musicians in fostering new transnational sensibilities in the politicized context of the cold war.


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-710
Author(s):  
Arturo Arias

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”


Author(s):  
Nicholas Grant

This chapter examines the anti-apartheid politics of the Washington-based National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Outlining the organization’s broader commitment to black international politics, it shows how its leadership worked with the State Department as it ought to expand its international activities in this era. As such, the chapter demonstrates how black liberals adapted to the climate of the Cold War when attempting to challenge colonialism overseas. Finally, by tracing the involvement of the NCNW with the African Children’s Feeding Scheme initiative, the chapter documents how highly gendered representations of the African family worked to promote a diasporic consciousness among African Americans. During the 1950s, images of the oppressed African mother, the poor and malnourished African child, and the African family in need of protection were deliberately employed as gendered motifs around which black women could build international alliances.


Author(s):  
Joaquín M. Chávez

Global and regional political and cultural trends shaped a set of interrelated and persistent conflicts between authoritarian regimes and democratic and revolutionary forces during the Cold War in Central America. US Cold War anticommunism, in particular, abetted authoritarian governments that sparked major conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. The failure of the post-World War II wave of democratization in Central America led to persistent revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics in the next three decades. Two successive waves of revolution emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The reverberations of the Cuban Revolution and US counterinsurgency mainly shaped the first wave of revolution and counterrevolution in the 1960s. The Cuban Revolution, progressive Catholicism, and the Sandinista Revolution mainly shaped the second wave of revolution and counterrevolution in the 1970s and 1980s. The armed conflict in Guatemala (1960–1996), El Salvador’s Civil War (1980–1992), and the Contra War in Nicaragua (1979–1991) became the last major Cold War conflicts in Latin America. The changing dynamics of the conflicts on the ground and the international consensus in favor of peace negotiations in Central America that emerged at the end of the Cold War enabled the political settlement of the conflicts. The peace processes that put an end to the armed conflicts created fragile democracies in the midst of the neoliberal restructuring of the 1990s, which limited the meaning of social citizenship in Central America.


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