Bush set out the American demands. He pushed Gorbachev to halt assistance to Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. This was top of the US list of priorities. The Soviet team was surprised. Gorbachev wanted to draw a „strategic and philosophical“ line under the Cold War.

—Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, (Yale University Press, 2022), 96.

Here Zubok is writing about Bush and Gorbachev meeting near Malta in December 1989. Topping the US list of priorities is Soviet support for Cuba and Nicaragua. I remember those years of incessant drumbeats insisting Americans fear impoverished Central Americans.