“The cold war is over, and Soviet expansionism in Latin America is a dead issue,” declares a recent editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle (September 26, 1990). Indeed, so extraordinary, so profound, so far-reaching are the changes that have occurred in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the Mujal-León volume went to press that evaluating this work has proven to be a singularly perplexing task. What in 1988, when work on the manuscript was completed, appeared to be “a developing relationship” between the USSR and Latin America was nothing of the kind only eighteen months later—not, at least, in the cold war sense of palpably expanding influence counter to U. S. interests, which is the operative assumption underlying this collection of twelve essays by Sovietologists and Latin Americanists from both the United States and Latin America.
So significant had the Soviet presence in Latin America become by the 1980s that a need was felt in U.S. foreign policy circles to conduct a major review of the Soviet-Latin American relationship. This took place in 1986-88 under the auspices of Princeton University’s Center for International Studies with financial support from the Tinker Foundation. The twelve scholars who collaborated with editor Eusebio Mujal-León and other specialists over the two-year period sought to offer “a historical perspective” that demonstrated “those patterns of continuity and change in Soviet behavior and attitudes—as well as in the Latin American response—which might provide clues about future trends in the USSR’s relationship with Latin America” (xv).
What is most striking about this volume is the eloquent way it demonstrates the danger of shaping historical analyses to meet the short-term exigencies of geopolitical agendas. In actuality, the volume’s contributors did not have a clue about the immediate future of the USSR, much less the longer-term directions of Soviet relations with Latin America. “Neither the geopolitical priority that Moscow assigns to Latin America in world affairs nor the general goals it pursues in the region seem likely to alter much in the foreseeable future,” writes one of them (p. 51). “Soviet policy has become a major factor in hemispheric realities,” asserts another, “and efforts to interpret and respond to it will become increasingly important” (p. 112). “Soviet interest and activities in Latin America are likely to grow over the next decade,” concludes the volume’s editor (p. 375).
None of the volume’s contributors foresaw that by the beginning of the next decade the geopolitical face of Eastern Europe would be fundamentally transformed and the very future of the USSR placed in serious question. Not only is the Soviet Union no longer a significant adversarial force in hemispheric affairs; it barely warrants notice except for the vacuum it has left in the chambers of cold war policy planning. Happily, all the major issues of inter-American affairs must now be reframed in their own proper contexts without reference to Soviet global designs.
For the historian, this is a particularly felicitous development. She or he can at last turn a scholarly eye to the protracted and engaging history of Soviet-Latin American relations unencumbered by the insidious ideological filters of the era just ended. The present volume, for its part, will serve as a useful source for better understanding those filters.