Killing The Myth Of David: Minimizing The Cuban Revolution’s Threat To U.S. Hegemony

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the historical nature of the relationship of the United States and Cuba. Since 1959, the United States has employed various means to undermine the influence of the Cuban Revolution in the wider Latin American and Caribbean world. The way that this has been accomplished has evolved over time. The scope of this thesis is mainly the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period when the use of direct covert operations were no longer explicitly approved of by the U.S. government. Instead, the main tactics used by the years covered within this study were what political scientists would term soft power. This soft power subversion included the use of mass media propaganda, diplomatic pressuring, and economic sabotage. The purpose of this thesis is to put these methods of persuasion into their proper historical and political context, and to analyze the effectiveness of these efforts in both isolating Cuba in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as their effect on the trajectory of Cuban-U.S. relations.