Caribbean Revolutions Cold War Armed Movements

This book provides both a historical introduction and a comparative analysis of the five most important guerrilla movements in the Caribbean Basin between 1959 and the 1990s, including Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Puerto Rico. The authors argue that the Cold War shaped and fueled the structure, tactics, and ideologies of the diverse movements taking place for the revolutionary cause, and address the particular impact that the Cuban Revolution had on the region. The first chapter of Caribbean Revolutions provides an introduction to the Cuban Revolution, the Cold War, and Marxist thought. Succeeding chapters analyze each case study individually and also provide discussions on the current political situation for all of the organizations covered in the book that remain active. With lists of suggested reading and extra resources in each chapter, this is written as an accessible course book for students of Latin American history and politics.

1. Cuban revolutionaries and the Caribbean Basin: an introduction; 2. Armed revolutionary struggle in Guatemala; 3. Armed revolutionary struggle in El Salvador; 4. The armed movement that took power: the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua; 5. Armed revolutionary struggle in Colombia; 6. Armed organizations within the Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist movement; 7. Armed revolutionary movements in comparative perspective.

Rachel A. May is Director of the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean (ISLAC) at the University of South Florida. She is the author of Terror in the Countryside: Campesino Responses to Political Violence in Guatemala, 1954–1985 (2001). She is the co-editor and a contributor to (Un)Civil Societies: Human Rights and Democratic Transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America (2007), and La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence (2014).
Alejandro Schneider is Professor of History at both the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of La Plata (Argentina). He is a labor historian who has worked on the history of armed and social movements in Latin America, and he is the author or editor of fourteen books on Argentine and Latin American history.
Roberto González Arana is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of Latin America and the Caribbean Studies at the University of the North (Uninorte) in Barranquilla, Colombia. His many publications include Dictaduras en el Caribe (2018) and Sociedades en conflicto: movimientos sociales en América Latina (2016).