American intervention in the Caribbean and Central America continues. Military dictators were supported by the USA during the Second World War on the ground they were anti- Nazi, and after the war, because they were anti-Communist:

In 1941, President Arias of Panama is deposed in a US-supported coup.

In 1944, the dictator of El Salvador, Martinez, is overthrown, but the new government itself is toppled by a counter-revolution by Martinez's former chief of police. The United States immediately recognizes the government of the new dictator. This move tarnishes the so-called Good Neighbour policy of the United States in the eyes of many Latin Americans.

In 1954, the elected president of Guatemala, Guzman, is overthrown by the American CIA, Central Intelligence Agency. Guzman's "crime" was introducing land reform which included seizing some unused lands held by the US-based United Fruit company.

In 1959, Fidel Castro's forces topple the corrupt government of the dictator Batista, and becomes president of Cuba. Initially supported by the CIA, the American government was alarmed by his success and attempt to eliminate him. The US imposes an economic embargo against Cuban sugar, a major export. The blockade is later made total. Faced with American opposition, Castro accepts the help and support of the Soviet Union. Continued Cuban-US tension leads to the CIA sponsored invasion of Cuba in 1961, the Bay of Pigs. The invasion is defeated, a major American humiliation.

In October 1962, the world is the on verge of the first mass nuclear war. (Technically, the Second World War was the first--and to date only--nuclear war.) Castro had given the Soviets permission to station nuclear missile launchers in Cuba. The new American president, John F. Kennedy, threatened to destroy the missiles if they were not removed. The Soviet leader, Khrushchev, backed down at the last moment and agreed to remove the missiles, but Cuba remained under US blockade.

As mural painter Diego Rivera celebrated the heritage of Mexico through visual images, the poet Octavio Paz, born in 1914, paid homage to the rise of a new feeling of Mexican self confidence during the middle part of the 20th century. Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.