The CIA’s Strategic Area Atlases of Central America and Cuba

Within months of the CIA-supported overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically-elected President, Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, the CIA began to produce strategic intelligence maps of Central America and Cuba. These “Area Analysis” atlases provided strategic information for planning and executing future foreign invasions and covert operations. Dividing each country into strategic regions, the Atlases highlighted each nation’s major roads and railways, as well as ports, airfields, military barracks, schools, government offices and other sites. Entire maps noted places for parachute drops, and descriptions marked areas for concealment and aerial reconnaissance. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the CIA’s “Area Analysis” Atlases of Central America and Cuba maps grew in number and detail. By the time of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA was producing new strategic Atlases of over one hundred pages every six months. The hubris of accuracy within cartography, particularly as it was rendered into one-dimensional maps at every-growing levels of detail, emboldened CIA officers to think that they had mastered the geography of a region and produced these countries as regions subject to communist influence and in need of foreign intervention. What they failed to account for was both the contingency of local knowledges and the social and political conditions that make-up landscapes, that is diverse and heterogeneous ways of understanding and navigating space in time. Analysing these Atlases, this paper examines the role of these Atlases is producing cartographic knowledge of bounded-territories that not only separated national and international space, but violated these boundaries and authorized an interventionist vision of U.S. empire.