Customer Reviews

The Masters of War: Cuba, the United States, and Latin America

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This book is a typical denunciation of US policy towards Latin America. It focuses on Cuba since the Revolution (1959), but covers events from countries throughout the region, including the Central American civil wars and the Southern Cone military dictatorships. Everything is true in the book; but its great weakness is that it is nothing more than a long list of events trying to show that US policy towards Latin America was belligerent in the latter half of the twentieth century. It lacks any original or dynamic interpretations. I would only recommend this book to someone who does not know, or believe, that the United States has behaved as an imperial power in Latin America.

In this excellent history of Latin America since 1959, the Colombian diplomat Clara Nieto surveys the continent country by country, showing how the US state has consistently intervened in their internal affairs.
The alliance of neo-liberalism and social democracy internally, the USA and the EU externally, has kept capitalism in power in Latin America. So half its people live in worsening poverty, a third are unemployed, and foreign debt totals $400 billion.
Nieto focuses on the Cuban revolution and its effects. In March 1959, President Eisenhower ordered CIA sabotage and terrorism against Cuba. Kennedy was worse: Nieto writes, "His policies opposing the Revolution were more aggressive than Eisenhower's." Two days before the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, US planes bombed Cuba's cities, under Kennedy's orders. Kennedy started the US policy of counter-insurgency in Latin America (and Africa and Asia), supporting death squads and military dictatorships. Nieto shows how the US state sponsored counterrevolutionary wars in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Guatemala and Chile.
Johnson carried on Kennedy's policies: he backed the generals' fascist coup in Brazil in 1964, and attacked the Dominican Republic in 1965. Nieto depicts Reagan's wars - occupying Honduras, arming the death squads of El Salvador, running the Contras' terrorist war against Nicaragua, attacking Grenada - and Bush's attack on Panama.
The US state has never ceased its illegal, terrorist attacks on Cuba. The New York Times reported in 1983 how the head of a Miami-based anti-Cuban terrorist group admitted in a US court that he had taken germs to Cuba in 1980, proving Cuba's accusations of CIA biological warfare against Cuba. The US state made Armando Valladares - a former Batista police officer and convicted terrorist - ambassador and president of its delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission.
But the Commission's 1989 report refuted all the US slanders about Cuba's torture and abuse of political prisoners. The world knows now who tortures and abuses political prisoners detained without charge or trial.
Nieto's final chapter examines how Cuba has survived and kept its revolution going. The key is that its people, determined to defend their democracy, independence and sovereignty, actively prevent the counter-revolution from organising.

Overall an excellent book that deals with U.S. military interventions in Latin America from the perspective of a Latin American scholar. My one critique of the book is an obvious bias against the United States with no intent on even trying to be objective. I would still highly recommend it. The obvious biases aside it is an excellent tool in understanding why Latin American people and leaders have negative feelings towards the United States and why Latin Americans see the U.S. as the bad guys.