During the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, the Caribbean was in crisis. The United States and the Soviet Union acted out the world’s tensions in its three most important nations: Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, the leaders of these nations - the charismatic Fidel Castro; his mysterious brother Raul; the ideologue Che Guevara; the capricious psychopath Rafael Trujillo; and Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, a buttoned-down doctor with interests in voodoo, embezzlement and torture - had ambitions of their own.
The superpowers thought they could use these Caribbean leaders as puppets, but what neither bargained for was that their puppets would come to life. The United States, in its all-consuming fight against communism, stumbled into one disaster after another. With the Bay of Pigs invasion, the United States pushed Cuba into an alliance with the Soviet a union. Then, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it helped bring the world to the brink of a catastrophic nuclear war.
