Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis

Postcolonial scholars show how knowledge practices participate in the production and reproduction of international hierarchy. A common effect of such practices is to marginalize Third World and other subaltern points of view. For three decades, analysis of the Cuban missile crisis was dominated by a discursive framing produced in the ExComm, one in which Cuba was invisible. The effort to produce a critical oral history enabled Cuban voices—long excluded from interpretive debates about the events of October 1962—to challenge the myth of the crisis as a superpower affair. Despite the oral history project's postcolonial intervention, however, and greater attention to Cuba's role in the crisis, this framing persists and is reproduced in the micro-practices of scholarship. Decolonizing the crisis, and by extension the discipline itself, is not easy to do.Postcolonial scholars show how knowledge practices participate in the production and reproduction of international hierarchy. A common effect of such practices is to marginalize Third World and other subaltern points of view. For three decades, analysis of the Cuban missile crisis was dominated by a discursive framing produced in the ExComm, one in which Cuba was invisible. The effort to produce a critical oral history enabled Cuban voices—long excluded from interpretive debates about the events of October 1962—to challenge the myth of the crisis as a superpower affair. Despite the oral history project's postcolonial intervention, however, and greater attention to Cuba's role in the crisis, this framing persists and is reproduced in the micro-practices of scholarship. Decolonizing the crisis, and by extension the discipline itself, is not easy to do