Before 1898, the most sustained attempt by the United States to acquire Cuba occurred during the presidency of Franklin Pierce when the debate about slavery was roiling US domestic politics. Spain responded to the threat with a dramatic change of policy: in order to gain the favour and protection of Britain, it ordered that the slave trade to Cuba be ended. This article analyses Pierce's strategy and examines the complex jockeying it precipitated among Washington, London and Madrid. Mining US, British and Spanish archives, it is the first international history of the crisis that Washington's avarice provoked.

This article focuses on the months before the Spanish-American war began in April 1898 and addresses two related questions: first, why was the opposition to the war so strong in the United States; second, why did it not prevail? To explore these questions, the papers of the McKinley administration are examined, along with the Congressional Record and forty-one US newspapers, as well as twelve major European newspapers (British, French, German and Spanish) and the relevant documents from the British and Spanish archives. It is only in the press that one can find a coherent, well-articulated and explicit explanation of the antiwar position.

As the rebels of Guinea-Bissau fought for independence from Portugal, Cuban military instructors stood by their side and Cuban doctors treated their wounds. Joining the rebellion in 1966, and remaining through the war's end in 1974, this was the longest Cuban intervention in Africa before the despatch of troops to Angola in November 1975. It was also the most successful. As the Guinean paper Nõ Pintcha declared, ‘The Cubans' solidarity was decisive for our struggle’. Cuba's contribution to Guinea-Bissau's war of independence is an important and revealing example of Cuban policy in Africa.

It was in Algeria that Cuba's involvement in Africa began. Until the overthrow of President Ben Bella in 1965, Algeria was Cuba's closest friend on the continent. Cuba provided both military and civilian assistance not only to the Algerian republic but also, before their victory, to the rebels of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Using Cuban documents, as well as US documents and interviews with protagonists, this article examines Cuba's relationship with Algeria in 1961–5. It is a relationship that clashes with the image of Cuban foreign policy – cynical ploys of a client state – that prevails not only in the United States but also in many European capitals.

A comprehensive study of the available documents about the Bay of Pigs, including many that have been declassified within the last eighteen months, and extensive interviews with the protagonists in the CIA, the White House and the State Department lead me to conclude that the disastrous operation was launched not simply because Kennedy was poorly served by his young staff and was the captive of his campaign rhetoric, nor simply because of the hubris of the CIA. Rather, the Bay of Pigs was approved because the CIA and the White House assumed they were speaking the same language when, in fact, they were speaking in utterly different tongues.

Sir, is there to be no limit to our benevolence for these People? There is a point, beyond which, even parental bounty and natural affection cease to impose an obligation. That point has been attained with the States of Spanish America.1

Of course there was sympathy for the Spanish American rebels in the United States. How could it have been otherwise? The rebels were fighting Spain, long an object of hatred and contempt. This alone justified goodwill, as did the hope for increased trade and the prospect of a significant loss of European influence in the hemisphere.2 But how deep did this sympathy run?

In the Congressional debates of the period there was much more enthusiasm for the cause of the Greeks than that of the Spanish Americans.3 Similarly, the press referred frequently to private collections of funds (‘liberal donations’) for the Greek fighters – not for the Spanish Americans. This is not surprising. The US public could feel a bond with the Greeks – ‘it will become even quite fashionable to assist the descendants of those who were the bulwark of light and knowledge in old times, in rescuing themselves from the dominion of a barbarian race'.4 Unlike the Greeks, however, the Spanish Americans were of dubious whiteness. Unlike the Greeks, they hailed not from a race of giants, but – when they were white – from degraded Spanish stock.5 Some US citizens felt for them the kinship of a common struggle against European colonial rule; others agreed with John Quincy Adams: ‘So far as they were contending for independence, I wished well to their cause; but I had seen and yet see no prospect that they would establish free or liberal institutions of government.

In the late morning of 18 July 1949, several armed men sped from Guatemala City in two cars. Near a small bridge, the Puente de la Gloria, they waited for Francisco Arana, Chief of the Armed Forces of Guatemala. They did not have to wait for long. As Arana and his three companions approached the Puente de la Gloria, ‘there was, on the other side, a grey Dodge, because of which, seeing that it was impossible to cross the bridge, Col. Arana stopped the car’.1 A brief shoot-out ensued. Arana lay dead. There was no investigation of his murder. His assassins were never apprehended.

The cry for land is, without any doubt, the loudest, the most dramatic and the most desperate sound in Guatemala.’ So wrote the Guatemalan bishops in 1988. In their country's long history, the bishops stated, only one president – Jacobo Arbenz – had addressed the issue of land reform.1 Inaugurated in 1951, Arbenz presided over the most successful agrarian reform in the history of Central America. The reports of the US embassy bear testimony to the fact that within eighteen months land was distributed to 100,000 peasant families, amid little violence and without adversely affecting production.2 Praise for initiating the reform does not belong, however, solely to Arbenz. As his wife observed, ‘Alone, he could not have done it’. Praise should also be given to the Communist party of Guatemala, whose leaders were Arbenz's closest personal and political friends.3

On 15 March 1945 Juan José Arévalo became president of Guatemala. His inauguration marked the beginning of an unprecedented democratic parenthesis – ‘spring in the land of eternal tyranny ’1 – a spring that ended abruptly with the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.

Arévalo was an anti-communist, a nationalist, and a reformer. He was an anti-communist who believed that individual communists should not be persecuted unless they violated the law. He was a nationalist who accepted that Guatemala was in the US sphere of influence. He was a reformer who eschewed radical change.