UNCORRECTED DRAFT—4/11/14 A "Friend of the Revolution" or a “Traitor”? Vasco Tristão Leitão da Cunha, Fidel Castro (and his Sister), and Brazilian-Cuban Relations, 1956-1964 By James G. Hershberg Professor of History and International Affairs George Washington University (
[email protected]) Presented to the Panel, “New Perspectives on Latin America’s Cold War” International Studies Association/Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (ISA/FLACSO) Conference, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 23 July 2014 1 This presentation draws on my ongoing book project on the US-Cuban-Brazilian triangular relationship (or quadrangular, if one adds their relations with what was quaintly still known as the “Sino-Soviet bloc”) at the height of the Cold War, in the early 1960s, a span encompassing such tumultuous events as the Cuban Revolution, the Bay of Pigs affair, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. My inquiry originated in, and spun off from, my longstanding in the international history of the October 1962 missile crisis, when in the late 1990s I first noticed (in a translated Soviet document) that at the height of the missile crisis, Brazil was involved in a secret mediation effort between US President John F. Kennedy and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. That Soviet document described a meeting between Castro and a special emissary sent by Brazil’s president, João Goulart, just after the crisis climaxed, relaying what in fact was a laundered U.S. proposal (although Castro didn’t realize that). On searching for background in the relevant literature—to use in annotating the document for the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, which I then edited—I discovered that none existed.