The Political and Economic Reverberations of the Cuban Revolution in Mexico

Abstract

AbstractCold War era studies considered the Cuban Revolution's influence on Mexico only mild. Current perspectives now interpret Cuba's impact on Mexico as highly significant. The regime crisis generated by the Cuban Revolution gave rise to an authoritarian Mexican state nationalism that repressed dissent, balanced off Cuban and US pressures, and induced private sector cooperation with an expanded economic and social role for government. Mexican state nationalism's apparent ‘solution’ to the domestic and international reverberations of the Cuban Revolution during the 1960s created a pattern of authoritarian political monopoly, dependence on foreign borrowing, and unsustainable heavy industrialization. Historians have tended to overlook how much this ingrained ‘formula’ laid the foundation for the country's disastrous populist policies that emerged after 1970.