The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War

Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war.

That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for postwar domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground—a standard account that obscures the shock waves that reverberated throughout Latin America.

Drawing on sources from across the hemisphere, this first hemispheric examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis shows how leaders and ordinary citizens throughout the region caused, participated in, and were profoundly affected by the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Join us to hear Dr Renata Keller discuss her new book on the subject and to answer any questions you may have.

Meet our speaker:

Renata Keller is an Associate Professor of Latin American History at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her second book, 'The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War' was published with UNC Press in October 2025. Her first book, 'Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution' (Cambridge, 2015) was awarded SECOLAS's Alfred B. Thomas Book Prize and honorable mentions for RMCLAS's Thomas McGann and Michael C. Meyer Prizes. Her research has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Philanthropic Educational Organization, the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, and other institutions. She is also a founding co-editor of InterConnections: The Global Twentieth Century, a new book series at UNC Press.

Meet our chair:

Tanya Harmer is a specialist on the Cold War in Latin America with a particular interest in the international, transnational and global dynamics of the struggle. She has written widely on Chile’s revolutionary process in the 1970s, the Cuban Revolution’s influence in Latin America, counter-revolution and inter-American diplomacy, solidarity networks, women and gender. Her first book, 'Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War' won LASA's Luciano Tomassini prize in 2013. Her latest book tells the story of Beatriz Allende and Chile’s Revolutionary Left that came of age in the shadow of the Cuban Revolution.

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