Professor Susanne Schech recently published an article in the Journal of Historical Geography.
Schech, S. (2022) Assembling humanitarianism in the Cold War: The role of the Red Cross in the Bay of Pigs prisoner exchange, Journal of Historical Geography
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748822000688
(In press, corrected proof, online 30 September 2022)
In this article, Susanne Schech examines the pivotal role of National Red Cross Societies in an unusual humanitarian operation in 1962-63 across Cold War fault lines. After the CIA-orchestrated invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to overthrow the Cuban government had been comprehensively defeated, 1100 US prisoners were languishing on the island. After 18 months of failed negotiations over their fate, collaboration between the American and the Cuban Red Cross Societies eventually secured the release of the prisoners in exchange for food and medical supplies. Lasting seven months, the Prisoner Exchange Project shows how Red Cross succeeded where government actors failed, through assembling a diversity of actors around the humanitarian objective, rendering political problems technical, and investing relational labour. By teasing out to how the humanitarian operation came together, evolved, and dispersed, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of humanitarian operations in seemingly intractable conflicts and contexts of unequal power.