By the mid-1960s, Cuba had consolidated its communist regime in Havana, and Cuba-inspired foco insurrections had emerged across the region, most extensively in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Guatemala. While Moscow was somewhat hesitant about exporting armed revolution lest it provoke Washington in its own backyard, Havana was bent on creating, as Che Guevara wrote in 1967, “many Vietnams” in the Americas.

During these same years, Washington was adamant that there could not be “another Cuba” in Latin America. After watching the utter debacle of the Bay of Pigs and Guatemala’s gradual descent into a crisis of governance and outright war, the Kennedy administration reasoned that one way to stem communism in Latin America was to avoid large-scale intervention and improbable military ventures. More effective, they thought, would be to deal instead with the root causes of inequity and injustice that led people in places like Cuba to turn to Marxist revolution in the first place. In the president’s oft-quoted view, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”