Speaker - Jonathan Brown

When Fidel Castro formed an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1962, it

sparked the Cuban missile crisis and became a defining incident of the Cold

War. Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana predates the Cuban missile crisis, but

the plot involves missile installations and seems to anticipate the events of

1962. In the real world, the British tolerated the Cuban revolutionaries.

American politicians, for domestic reasons, could not. The British refused to

join the American economic boycott of the Revolution. Did Britain help the

Cuban Revolution to survive US antagonism?

Jonathan Brown's book, Cuba's Revolutionary World was published by Harvard

University Press in 2017. His other books include Oil and Revolution in Mexico

(1993); and A Socioeconomic History of Argentina (1979). His articles have

been translated into many languages including Chinese. With Alan Knight he

edited The Mexican Petroleum Industry in the Twentieth Century (1992). With a

UT Ph.D. in History, he has taught at UT History since 1983. He is presently

writing a book on the renegotiation of the Panama Canal Treaty.