During the decade of the 1960s, racial and c1ass tensions exploded in the United States. Revolutionary Black leaders gained international recognition and notoriety as the pacifist civil rights leadership of the 1950s and early 1960s yielded to the proponents of Black Power and militant nationalism. The Vietnam conftict and its progeny, the antiwar movement, were heating up, anticolonial guerrilla warfare was being waged around the globe, and Cuba became a lightning rod for both conftict between geopolitical rivals-the United States and the Soviet Union-and inspiration to those in struggle for radical change.