Cold War assumptions and their historical impact

Cold War Rhetoric and American Involvement: An Evaluation of the Validity of the Cold War Assumptions made by U.S. policy makers in the 1940's and 1950's

During the 1940s and the 1950s, U.S. foreign policy makers were faced with an unprecedented and unexpected threat from the Soviet Union. Because of this threat, this period of U.S. History became known as 'The Cold War.' The Soviet ally whom the United States had relied upon during World War II had metamorphosed into a danger to U.S. international security, rather than a friend. The U.S.S.R.'s influence, by the end of the 1940s, had spread across Eastern Europe and threatened Western Europe. The United States began to see communism itself as an infection, spawned by Stalin, rather than as a complex ideology. U.S. policy makers feared that communism, which they equated with Soviet foreign influence, could spread anywhere around the globe where revolution might be fermenting.

Latin America and the United States had also had a long and complex history. The United States had defined Latin America to be part of its sphere of influence in the 19th century. When the U.S. felt threatened, it claimed rights, in the name of self-protection, to become involved in the political doings and dealings of the Latin American nation. However, Latin American nationals themselves did not always agree with the fairness of this doctrine. When communism seemed to extend its influence into Latin American nations such as Cuba during the 1950s, the U.S. was quick to point to the Soviet Union as the source of Marxist ideology. It claimed that, in the interests of national security, it must eradicate this influence.

What U.S. policy makers failed to allow for, was the fact that communist and Marxist ideology was not always a pure imposition upon the poverty-stricken peoples of Latin America, as it was upon the nationals of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. Latin America, like Russia before the 1917 Revolution in that nation, consisted of nations inexorably divided between economic 'haves' and economic 'have nots.' Thus, the ideology of communism had a great deal of popular and populist appeal in many Latin American nations. Even for those nationals whose ideology might not have been perfectly corresponding to every word of Marx, the broad, ideological brushstrokes of communism did have some attraction. Furthermore, because of the colonial influence of Europe, as well as the influence of America and America's financial backing and political support for unpopular and tyrannical yet U.S.-friendly dictators such as Baptista, many Latin Americans felt none too friendly towards the United States.

In the rhetoric of revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, nationalism and communism became fused. Any political movement that the United States disagreed with and hated was acceptable, in the name of nationalism. Many ordinary Latin American nationals willingly supported communists, not because they were ardent believers in communism, or because they had such affection for the Soviet Union, but because independence and the right to self-determination were such an integral part of the communist cause. Marxism and nationalism and a positive realignment of the class structure that existed were ideologically fused.

The Soviet Union did support Castro. There is no historical doubt of this fact. But this financial backing did not mean that the United States was justified in seeing Cuba as a mere puppet of the Soviet regime. Furthermore, the paranoia of U.S. policy makers led them to become instrumental in terminating the Guatemalan revolution, where a socialist leader had electoral and democratic support. Instead, the U.S. supported a right wing tyranny, justifying stifling supposedly Soviet-backed socialism that they insisted was extending into the region. ("1954 Terminating a Revolution in Guatemala -- A View from Washington & John C. Dreier's 1954 Terminating a Revolution in Guatemala -- A View from Guatemala cited in Holden and Zolov)