Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) wrote that Latin America was the only region of the world outside of Europe that he knew well and felt completely at home in. He claimed this was because it was the only part of the Third World whose two main languages, Spanish and Portuguese, were accessible to him. Additionally, he was drawn to the potential for social revolutions in Latin America. After Fidel Castro's triumph in Cuba in January 1959, and even more so after the failure of the American attempt to overthrow him in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, he noted that "there was no intellectual in Europe or the USA who had not succumbed to the allure of Latin America, a continent that seemed to be bubbling with the lava of social revolutions." The Third World brought the hope of revolution back to the First in the 1960s.