The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War

InterConnections: The Global 20th Century

by Renata Keller

Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for postwar domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground--a standard account that obscures the shock waves that reverberated throughout Latin America. This first hemispheric examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis shows how leaders and ordinary citizens throughout the region experienced it, revealing that, had the missiles been activated, millions of people across Latin America would have been at grave risk.

Traversing the region from the Southern Cone to Central America, Renata Keller describes the deadly riots that shook Bolivia when news of the Cuban Missile Crisis broke, the naval quarantine that members of Argentina's armed forces formed around Cuba, the pro-Castro demonstrations organized by Nicaraguan students, and much more. Drawing on a vast array of archival sources from around the hemisphere and world, The Fate of the Americas demonstrates that even at the brink of destruction, Latin Americans played active roles in global politics and inter-American relations.

Genres: History

332 pages, Hardcover

First published October 21, 2025

Reviews

[Andrés Pertierra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writing in my capacity as a historian of Cuba. This is yet another obligatory read from Renata Keller, whose work is consistently part of the bleeding edge on Cuban foreign policy post-1959.

The book somehow manages to take the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, probably the best studied topic in Cuban Studies, and add to it. She does this by expanding our understanding of the crisis outwards from just a US-Cuba-USSR triangle to also encompass Latin American states. Similar to how Tanya Harmer's book Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (UNC Press, 2014), Keller does an excellent job showing how Latin American states acted in pursuit of their own perceived interests, not merely as lackeys of the US. More than just explain their behavior, however, she also shows how the crisis helped lead to important shifts in the dynamics between key Latin American states and the US, such as consolidating US-Bolivian cooperation in the 1960s (obviously relevant since this is where Che Guevara would meet his end) and highlighting the fractures in Brazilian politics that the US would encourage in the leadup to the military coup against João Goulart in 1964.

She manages to do this, in typical Keller fashion, in clear prose that even a total non-specialist will be able to follow readily. Can see this being used in classrooms, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as being something that the interested general public can easily benefit from. The fact that several key chapters can also be read largely on their own will also make it easier for educators to assign it to students.

The book also has an audiobook version, so you can just listen to it that way.

Strongest recommendation to check it out.