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Finally, Cold War rivalry and Third World problems intersected devastatingly in America’s own backyard. Before the era of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, the United States had frequently been accused of meddling too much in the affairs of other states in the hemisphere. By the 1950s the contradictory charge was leveled that the United States was not involving itself enough, as evidenced by the fact that the United States spent $12,600,000,000 on aid to Asia and the Middle East in the period 1953–57 compared with $1,900,000,000 on Latin America. Resentment over the CIA’s role in toppling an allegedly Communist-backed government in Guatemala in 1954 and violent protests against Vice President Richard M. Nixon during his trip to Caracas and Lima in 1958 alerted Washington to the dangers inherent in neglecting the genuine needs of the region. The United States agreed to fund an Inter-American Development Bank, while the State Department sought to avoid too close an association with unpopular, authoritarian regimes. Whatever the overall merits of such a policy, it had immediate and disastrous effects in Cuba.
In 1952 Fulgencio Batista established a corrupt dictatorship in Cuba, and four years later a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro took to the Sierra Maestra with 150 comrades and made pretensions of fighting a guerrilla war. In fact, Castro’s campaign was largely propaganda (the insurgents lost only 40 men in the largest engagement), and the real struggle for Cuba was fought out in the arenas of Cuban and American public opinion. After Nixon’s tour, liberal opinion and the State Department deserted Batista, and the new ambassador to Havana was ordered to preside over his fall. In March 1958 the United States suspended arms sales to Cuba, and on January 1, 1959, a triumphant Castro entered Havana without the necessity of fighting a battle. Contrary to his image as a populist and democrat, Castro made himself the new dictator, nationalized hundreds of millions of dollars worth of American property, and declared that he was and always had been a Marxist. His actions gradually alienated whatever sympathy he had in the United States. Castro invited Soviet aid and came to rely on it heavily after the United States curtailed Cuba’s sugar import quota in July 1960. Eisenhower instructed the CIA to explore means of removing Castro, who made Cuba into an immensely valuable Soviet satellite 90 miles from the United States.
By 1960, therefore, the post-Sputnik world posed new challenges for the Western alliance stretching from outer space to Third World jungles. Polls showed that a majority of western Europeans believed Khrushchev’s propaganda about Soviet superiority and that a majority of Americans no longer believed in Eisenhower’s low-key approach to Cold War issues.