A persistent theme in twentieth-century Latin American history is the presence of radical political movements for social change.
Scholars often have emphasized the dramatic breaks which a series of revolutionary upheavals in Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua made in the continuous development of Latin American history. Indeed, Fidel Castro’s successful 1959 revolution in Cuba is widely considered to be a singularly significant event which influenced the course of this history. The European doctrine of Marxism, which became influential among Latin American intellectuals and others who were looking for a way to bring about radical social change throughout Latin America, played an important role in the unfolding of drastic changes. The United States has tended to depict any hint of Marxist influence in Latin America as part of the penetration of an alien ideology into the American hemisphere. Presidential administrations in the United States have considered leftist revolutionary governments in Cuba and Nicaragua to be merely pawns of the Soviet Union, part of a Moscow-based ploy aimed at world communist domination. Rather than recognizing the indigenous roots of these revolts, the United States searched for “Bolshevik” or “Soviet” influences in Latin American revolutionary movements, thereby casting them as part of a European-centered East-West cold war conflict. The response therefore was a strong (and sometimes paranoid) opposition to any winds of radical change in Latin America, and a long history of American interference in the internal affairs of various Latin American countries which had experienced revolutionary change.