Fidel Castro led the Cuban revolution and worked to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. After the revolution, Castro became Cuba’s prime minister from 1959-1976 and president from 1976-2008. Castro turned Cuba into a communist country, forged strong ties with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and exported revolution to other parts of the world.
Containing over 500 newly declassified and translated documents from international sources, this is the most extensive collection ever presented of original, never-before published, non-US primary sources on the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The forging of the Soviet-Cuban alliance in the years after Fidel Castro’s revolution took power in January 1959, in sync with a deepening split between Washington and Havana, was one of the tectonic developments of the Cold War. Much evidence has emerged, especially on the Soviet side, on relations between the two communist countries and their charismatic leaders, Castro and Nikita Khrushchev, climaxing with the October 1962 missile crisis.
