The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) is pleased to announce the publication of e-Dossier No. 7, "Operation Manuel: Czechoslovakia and Cuba," featuring documents were found by a team of researchers headed by Oldrich Tuma in the archives of the Ministry of the Interior in Prague and introduced by Daniela Spenser (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (Mexico City). To access the e-Dossier, go to cwihp.si.edu.
The documents are the most recent accession to CWIHP's fully-searchable "Virtual Archive" of translated Cold War documents.
The publication is part of the Project's new initiative on the Cold War in Latin America. The CWIHP Latin America Initiative, pursued in cooperation with Yale University's Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies (see www.yale.edu/las/conferences.html), the National Security Archive (George Washington University (see www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv), and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (Mexico City, see www.ciesas.edu.mx). The CWIHP Latin American Initiative seeks bring together three scholarly communities which have thus far worked in relative isolation: North American Latin American Studies; North American/European/Russian and other Cold War scholars; and Latin American historians for cross-fertilizing discussions on the history of the Cold War in Latin America.
In addition, the CWIHP Initiative seeks to explore new, unpublished and thus far largely ignored documentation on the subject in former Communist-world archives, U.S. archives, and Latin American archives.
A first international conference, "México, América Central y el Caribe durante la Guerra Fría," co-sponsored by the CWIHP Initiative on Latin America & the Cold War was held in November 2002 in Mexico City, hosted by CIESAS in cooperation with Yale and the Mexican Foreign Ministry Archives. In March 2003, CWIHP and the Woodrow Wilson Center's Latin American Program sponsored an international conference on "Argentina-United States Bilateral Relations: An Historical Perspective and Future Challenges," which featured newly declassified documents on the "Dirty War." Additional conferences are being planned.
CWIHP has also sponsored research in Eastern European archives as well as Mexican and Chilean archives, and is seeking new partners and new materials on the Cold War in Latin America (in particular from former Communist world and other archives, for example on East-bloc arms deliveries to Latin American countries etc).
To contribute to this CWIHP Initiative, please contact the project at coldwar1@wwic.si.edu. Additional documents produced by the CWIHP Initiative on Latin America will be published on the CWIHP website at cwihp.si.edu.