Lorraine Bayard de Volo

Lorraine Bayard de Volo

Lorraine Bayard de Volo is a political scientist and serves as Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her areas of research include gender, sexuality, and race as they relate to militarization, war, and revolution in Latin America. She has conducted fieldwork in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico (Chiapas), and Nicaragua. She also does work on gender and political violence in the U.S., with particular focus on military sexual assault as well as drone warfare. She recently published a piece on masculinity and the Cuban Missile Crisis in International Affairs. She has a book on Cuba: Women and the Cuban Insurrection: How Gender Shaped Castro’s Victory. She is also the author of Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs: Gender Identity Politics in Nicaragua, 1979-1999. Her current research project takes a postcolonial, feminist approach to Cold War Cuba, and she is developing a book that goes beyond the superpower narratives through a Cuba-centric analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis. She can be reached at LBDV@colorado.edu

Lorraine Bayard de Volo

A Postcolonial Approach to the Cuban Missile Crisis

by Lorraine Bayard de Volo | 11 November, 2022 | Cuban Missile Crisis

The October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the most closely-studied events of the Cold War. For several decades, the missile crisis literature supported a largely heroic U.S.-centric narrative that relied primarily upon the perspectives of President John F. Kennedy’s administration. This U.S.-centrism is generally acknowledged today, and the literature is increasingly enriched by the emergence of Soviet sources. However, the missile crisis literature’s representation of Cuba remains partial—both incomplete and biased. Six decades after the crisis, postcolonial...

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