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Cuban Missile Crisis: 5 ways leftist ideology lives on in Latin America

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the US and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war over the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

El Salvador, Uruguay, Nicaragua

In several countries throughout the region, former members of parties with Communist ties, some of them the main actors in cold war battles with the US, have won presidencies.

In Uruguay, President Jose Mujica was former member of the Tupamaros movement in the '60s, which was inspired by Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba. President Mujica spent 14 years in a military prison for his rebel activities, only released in 1985. He began his term as president in 2010.

In El Salvador, President Mauricio Funes was the candidate of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, which was an umbrella group for the Communist party and other leftists formed in 1980. The FMLN fought the Salvadoran government during the country’s civil war from 1980 to 1992. At the close of civil war it became a legal political organization but only gained the presidency with the 2009 win of Mr. Funes, a former journalist and moderate.

And in Nicaragua, Sandinista Daniel Ortega started a second term as president in 2006. President Ortega was a major cold war figure, having joined the Sandinistas and helped the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. He served a first presidential term from 1985 to 1990, during which his Marxist-inspired policies such as land reform provoked US response in the form of funds to the right-wing Contras. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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