Red Star Over Cuba: A Global History of Anti-Castroism After the Bay of Pigs

FAIN: FEL-281739-22

Michelle Chi Chase
Pace University (New York, NY 10038-1502)

Research and writing leading to a book on anti-communist activism among Cuban exiles after 1961.

My book manuscript provides the first history of Cuban exiles’ transnational anti-communist activism in the decades after the Cuban Revolution. I argue that Cuban anti-communism was never restricted to merely opposing Fidel Castro; instead, it was a global political movement with far-reaching consequences. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, Cuban anti-communist militants took their struggle to Latin America and beyond, applying the military and political experience they developed opposing Castro to help defeat revolutionary and national liberation movements from Puerto Rico to Nicaragua to the Congo. This book will consequently reframe standard assumptions of Cuban counter-revolutionary “failure,” showing that militant exiles’ greatest victories occurred elsewhere in the developing and decolonizing world. Recovering this unknown history sheds new light on the Cold War in the global south by exposing widespread Cuban influence on the anti-communist right, not only the left.