In 1976, Panamanian and Cuban nationalists forged a strategic alliance aimed at reclaiming key extraterritorial enclaves the United States coercively held in both countries: the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone and the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay in eastern Cuba. One year later, Panama and the U.S. signed a bilateral agreement stipulating the gradual cession of the Canal Zone to Panama, to be completed by December 31, 1999. Across the Caribbean basin, however, Fidel Castro’s many attempts to reclaim Guantánamo were unsuccessful. Even so, over the course of the Canal transition, the relationship between Panama City and Havana offered the Cuban government a crucial diplomatic and logistical connection to the rest of the region. Using Panama’s lax banking laws and robust military and trade infrastructure along the Canal, the Cuban government funneled arms, money and personnel to the factions that Havana backed during the civil wars that swept Central America in the 1980s. These same legal and trade infrastructures—particularly Panama’s banking secrecy laws and its largely unregulated free trade zone on the Caribbean entrance to the Canal—allowed Cuba to skirt the U.S. economic embargo against the island. Thus, though the Panamanian-Cuban relationship was forged in the two countries’ shared struggle against U.S. extraterritoriality, it ultimately became an avenue for Havana’s most robust access to finance and trade in the hemisphere.

Miriam Pensack is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of History at Princeton University. Her scholarship and teaching focus on modern Latin American political history and U.S. foreign policy in the region, with particular emphases on the Latin American Cold War, national security, immigration in the Americas and transnational anti-imperial movements.

She received her doctorate from New York University in 2024, and in 2023 was an associate researcher at the Panamanian Ministry of Culture's Centro de Investigaciones Históricas Antropológicas y Culturales. She is currently at work on her first monograph, preliminarily titled The Empire Within: Guantánamo Bay and the Panama Canal from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

Pre-Circulated Paper and Registration

The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Amanda Pinheiro.