| Chapter 2: | The Relations of Cuba with Latin America and the Caribbean: The Long and Winding Road of Reconciliation |
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book, Peace in Colombia (La Paz en Colombia). In its introduction, the Cuban ex-president refers to the topic, directly reiterating his previous positions: “Regarding the supply of arms to revolutionaries we maintain a strict adherence to the policy that arms were supplied on the basis of whether or not the government challenged by the guerrillas was belligerent or non-belligerent toward Cuba.”8
After Cuba was dismissed from the OAS, only Mexico and Canada did not terminate their relations with the country. Canada’s relations were maintained at a low profile but were independent of the policies of the United States.9 However, the stance of the Mexican government, especially the administration of Adolfo Lopez Mateo (1958–1964), was more important. In the face of all of the attacks that were launched against Cuba during that period, including the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Mexico voiced a position of nonintervention against Cuba to both the United States and the United Nations.
It should not be forgotten that the Cuban revolution generated tremendous support in this era, especially among young people, including those in Mexico. Many revolutionary Mexicans from the decade of the 1960s did not understand Castro’s political commitment to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and ex-president Lazaro Cardenas, which appeared to go beyond the strategic relationship between the two governments. During the 1960s, the Mexican government was the only one in the region that was allied with Cuba, and in the 1970s, when the government of Luis Echevarria Alvarez (1970–1976) defended a broader Mexican foreign policy of ideological pluralism, the country’s friendship remained very important to Cuba.
The decade of the 1970s began with new tendencies in international relations. Luis Maira, a well-known Chilean political analyst, summarized those processes, pointing to direct, serious consequences for the United States. In the economic arena, Maira identified the consequences of the economic recessions of 1971 to 1972 and 1974 to 1975 that were linked to the breakdown of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreements and a fall in the value of the U.S. dollar. He also detailed the impact of the growth in power of the Organization of Petroleum Exploring Countries