Materials on contemporary Cuba constitute an important section of the Americas Collection. Notable is the run of serials and newspapers from the 1960s into the 1980s, acquired during those years of U.S.-Cuban governmental hostility through a special arrangement with the Biblioteca Nacional Jos Mart in Havana. Included are works dealing with the revolution of 1895-1898 and the writings of Mart . Intensive collecting has been carried out for works covering the Castro period, especially the writings and speeches of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and on Soviet policy toward the island, making this part of the collection one of the most significant in the world. Cuban specialist and later Soviet Ambassador to Mexico, Oleg Daroussenkov, dealing with Soviet policy toward Cuba and Daroussenkov's personal contacts with the Castro brothers and Che Guevara.
Collections related to Nicaragua constitute a unique archival resource.
They include the more than 12,000 items that the Sandinista government censored out of the opposition newspaper La Prensa between 1982 and 1986, collected by Roberto Cardenal Chamorro. There is an oral history of Costa Rican democracy since 1948, consisting of three dozen taped interviews with former presidents, ministers and other political figures, together with reports and documents of the Costa Rican legislature's investigation into Cuban support for the Sandinistas in 1978-79, including an interview with then Costa Rican Interior Minister Johnny Echeverria. There are many documents of the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front guerrilla movement in El Salvador during the 1980s and on the Mexican left, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s. The United States Collection, the dominant area represented in the North American Collection, contains approximately 25,000 books and nearly three thousand periodical and newspaper titles, as well as a large holding of personal papers and archives. The main emphasis has been on the domestic developments and international policies of the United States during the two world wars, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and specifically U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet Union and other countries through the period of the Cold War and into the time of the expanding world market.