For 13 days beginning on October 16, 1962 the world teetered on total nuclear destruction. I think for most of us, we see this as a contest of wills between John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro. But it turns out that there were a lot more actors involved during those two weeks in 1962, it’s just that no one has really ever written about them before.
Today, Dr. Renata Keller joins in to talk about her new book which details what was happening in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, taking readers on a tour of Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, and beyond. And as you can imagine, the responses to the crisis were as varied as the people themselves. Further, these nation states were not merely witnesses to the event—many actively joined in on the quarantine around Cuba and created sanctions on their own.
In the video below, Renata talks about Cuba’s own divided response to Crisis itself:
So to talk about Renata’s work, we decided to revisit one of our favorite “history” movies: Kevin Costner’s Thirteen Days. I’ve always found this movie to be an absolutely brilliant depiction of the Crisis onscreen, and was pretty happy to hear that Renata actually uses it class. So our conversation today bounces back and forth between what we saw onscreen with Renata filling in the details behind what we don’t see in the film. This is a deep dive into the Cuban Missile Crisis and I really hope you enjoy it.
About our guest:
Dr. Renata Keller specializes in Latin American and Cold War history. Her second book, The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War (UNC Press, 2025), uncovers how people and governments across the Americas caused, participated in, and were affected by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Her first book, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge, 2015), explored how the Cuban Revolution transformed Mexico’s domestic politics and international relations. It was awarded SECOLAS’s Alfred B. Thomas Book Prize and honorable mentions for RMCLAS’s Thomas McGann and Michael C. Meyer Prizes.
She received her B.A. in History and Spanish from Arizona State University and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She taught international relations at Boston University for five years before joining the History Department at the University of Nevada in 2017. She has published journal articles in The Journal of Latin American Studies, The Journal of Cold War Studies, The Journal of Cold War History, The Latin American Research Review, Diplomatic History, Contexto Internacional, and Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, as well as popular articles in History Today and The Washington Post. Her research has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Philanthropic Educational Organization, the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, and other institutions. She is co-editor of InterConnections: The Global Twentieth Century, a new book series at UNC Press that is home to innovative global, international, and transregional histories of the long twentieth century.
She is also a dedicated educator. She teaches classes on modern Latin American history, Cuban history, the global Cold War, and drugs and security in the Americas. She also enjoys training the next generation of thinkers, historians, and history teachers in my classes on historical research and writing, historiography, historiography of the Americas, and her graduate research seminar on twentieth-century history.
Find her book:
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The Pod
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Alright, I’m off to give some talks to the amazing folks here at Missouri S&T University. Hope you are having a terrific day where you are. :)
Jason
I do not receive anything for this; you just get a nice little discount. :)
I love Thirteen Days! My parents, who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis when a young married couple, also loved it. It has the feel of an excellent action/political thriller, similar to All the President’s Men that way.