"In Cuba, the passing of Fidel Castro from this world and of Raúl Castro from power have raised urgent questions about the island's political future. In the United States, Barack Obama's opening to Cuba, the reversal of that policy during Donald Trump's administration, and Joseph Biden's apparent willingness to reinitiate open relations have made the nature of the historic relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. In both...

"Secret operations, corruption, crime, and a city teeming with spies: why Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War as Washington DC or Moscow. The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. With its population of Communist exiles from Cuba, its strategic value for military...

"In 1961, the new president John F. Kennedy, inherited an ill-conceived, poorly executed invasion of Cuba that failed miserably and set in motion the events that put the U.S. and the Soviet Union on a collision course that nearly started a war that would have enveloped much of the world. Extensively researched and vividly imagined, The Shadow of War brings to life the many threads that lead to the building crisis between the Soviet Union and the United...

Jules Benjamin argues convincingly that modern conflicts between Cuba and the United States stem from a long history of U.S. hegemony and Cuban resistance. He shows what difficulties the smaller country encountered because of U.S. efforts first to make it part of an "empire of liberty" and later to dominate it by economic methods, and he analyzes the kind of misreading of ardent nationalism that continues to plague U.S. policymaking. "An original...

The Cuban Revolution was a catalyst in shaping American foreign policy over the past generation. Welch's study is the first detailed evaluation of U.S. policy toward Cuba in the early years of the Castro regime and the first effort to analyze public sentiment during that crucial period. Our response to Cuba was a mirror of our Cold War assumptions and frustrations--and of our apprehensions concerning revolutionary movements abroad.

Ever since Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba in 1959, Americans have obsessed about the nation ninety miles south of the Florida Keys. America's fixation on the tropical socialist republic has only grown over the years, fueled in part by successive waves of Cuban immigration and Castro's larger-than-life persona. Cubans are now a major ethnic group in Florida, and the exile community is so powerful that every American president has curried favor...