Renata Keller, University of Nevada, Reno, author of The Fate of the
Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War

In this presentation, Professor Renata Keller will deliver the first hemispheric history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for global domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground—a standard account that obscures the shock waves that reverberated throughout Latin America. This first hemispheric examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis shows how leaders and ordinary citizens throughout the region
helped cause, participated in, and were affected by the crisis.
Renata Keller is an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the
author of The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold
War (UNC Press, 2025) and Mexico's Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the
Mexican Revolution (Cambridge, 2015). She is a founding co-editor of the "InterConnections:
The Global 20th Century" book series at UNC Press.