America's secret war in the Caribbean during the Cold War is revealed as never before in this riveting story of the machinations of superpowers and the daring of the mavericks who took them on.During the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, the Caribbean was in crisis. The United States and the Soviet Union acted out the world's tensions on its three most important island nations, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile the leaders and powerbrokers of these nations---the charismatic Fidel Castro; his mysterious brother Raul; the ideologue Che Guevara; the capricious psychopath Rafael Trujillo; and Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, a buttoned-down doctor with interests in Vodou, embezzlement, and torture---had ambitions of their own.Alex von Tunzelmann's brilliant narrative follows these five rivals and accomplices through the Cold War. The superpowers thought they could use these Caribbean leaders as puppets, but neither bargained on their puppets coming to life. The United States, in its all-consuming fight against communism, stumbled into one disaster after another. With the Bay of Pigs invasion, it propelled Cuba into an alliance with the Soviet Union. Then, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it helped bring the world as close to catastrophic nuclear war as it has ever been. Steeped in new archival material and eyewitness accounts, Red Heat is an authoritative and shocking account of a wildly dramatic and dangerous era of international politics that has unmistakable resonance today. Read Less