U.S. Policy toward Latin America since 1959

Abstract

This chapter explains the ways in which U.S. policy toward revolutionary Cuba has differed from its policy toward the rest of Latin America. Washington's refusal to recognize the government of Cuba has far exceeded the distance it maintains with other revolutionary or enemy states. Whereas the United States recognized the Soviet Union sixteen years after the Bolshevik seizure of power and recognized the People's Republic of China twenty-two years after 1949, the level of hostility toward Havana has been such that the United States refrains from normal diplomatic relations to this day and has spent most of the past five decades trying to overthrow the island's government. There is no situation even remotely like this in the two-century history of U.S. policy toward the rest of Latin America.