Cuba's Reintegration into the Inter-American System: The Treaty of Tlatelolco, the OAS, and the End of Latin America's Cold War

This paper situates Cuba's reintegration into the inter-American system through its journey becoming a signatory to the Treaty of Tlatelolco -- the first nuclear weapons-free zone treaty designated to a populated region. The paper first analyzes and historicizes contested definitions of terms such as Latin Americanism vis à vis Pan-Americanism, the inter-American system, and different understandings of when the Cold War in Latin America closed. The paper then places the policies of revolutionary Cuba within the context of Castro's perception of the island as the vanguard of Latin Americanism. The paper concludes with how the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's ally, prompted Castro to renounce the island's Cold War image and policies of revolutionary militarism in exchange for those of medical humanitarianism beginning in the 1990s. Castro's renunciation of the island's Cold War image was primarily facilitated through the island's acceptance of the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which initiated the process of Cuba's reintegration into Latin American affairs despite the United States’ unchanged foreign policy toward the island. Though the Latin American desire for nonproliferation emerged from the Cuban missile crisis, Castro understood the treaty as the Global South's post-colonial contestation against the nuclear-powered Cold War hegemon, the United States, which partially drove his desire to join the Tlatelolco regime. This paper thus contributes to the established corpus of academic discussion on the end of the Cold War, Latin American-U.S. relations, nonproliferation history, and postcolonialism.