The world begins a five-year journey to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Cold War enemies hurtle toward one another. At the collision point lies an impoverished island in the Caribbean. The proxy war is born. It's both a throwback and a harbinger. Cuba's gamecocks preen and posture. Dictator Batista apes Mussolini. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara channel Robin Hood. The pageant holds the world rapt. No one notices the outcasts, one falling from the sky and another skittering up the mountainside. But it is they, not the strutting roosters and their masters, who may decide the contest. The first is Dolores Ramirez. A Latina and public-school alumna, she doesn't conform to the cookie-cutter profile of 1950s' American diplomats. The other, "the phantom," is an orphan, a worldling, and a soldier whose singular background lands him an uneasy place among CIA's plutocrats. The two blend more readily with Castro's rebel army, itself a ragtag clutch of amateurs. Can two misfits turn the tide of history? The Children of Outer Darkness is illustrated with vintage photographs that reveal the truth behind the fiction, contextualizing and amplifying the story's references to the past.