One of JFK’s best biographers put it this way, How could he square professions of self-determination—a central principle of the Alliance—with the reality of secret American interventions in Cuba, Brazil, British Guiana, Peru, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and every country that seemed vulnerable to left-wing subversion? (And that was just the beginning: A June National Security directive approved by the president had listed four additional Latin American countries “sufficiently threatened by Communist-inspired insurgency”—Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, and Venezuela.…)32
