Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez and Guion Bluford

Abstract

Cathleen Lewis argues that throughout the Cold War, race played an important role in foreign policy with the United States painfully aware that its civil rights situation could have an adverse impact on foreign policy ambitions abroad. The USSR preyed on that U.S. sensitivity, calling the country out on its failures. In the early 1980s, almost a decade after U.S. foreign policy had all but abandoned race as a Cold War issue, the race issue reemerged, albeit briefly when the USSR launched the first black man into space, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, beating NASA’s own Guion Bluford. This final battle over race in the Cold War ultimately revealed American domestic progress and the hollowness of Soviet space stunts.