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Filibustering is one of the romantic byways of nineteenth- and twentieth-century warfare. From the expeditions of Narciso Lopez to Cuba and William Walker to Nicaragua in the 1850s, to Fidel Castro's invasion of Cuba a century later, small-scale military drama-sometimes opera bouffeseemed to characterize the international politics of the Caribbean basin. Caribbean filibustering flourished into the early post-World War II era, but faded with the intensification of the Cold War as the CIA and the KGB established a duopoly in the business of cross-border revolution. The Caribbean's last successful entrepreneurial revolutionary, Fidel Castro, became a subsidiary of one of the great powers, while the other great power insisted on total control over all efforts to overthow him-with disastrous results at the Bay...