The Cuban Revolution dominated U.S. policy toward Latin America during the Cold War and beyond. This relationship had a deep and complex history that created context for the events of 1959. For historian Louis Pérez, Jr., Cuba had been a proving ground for the broader extension of U.S. political, economic, and cultural influence since the nineteenth century:
Cuba occupies a special place in the history of American imperialism. It has served as something of a laboratory for the development of the methods by which the United States has pursued the creation of a global empire. In the aggregate, the means used by the United States in Cuba constitute a microcosm of the American imperial experience: armed intervention and military occupation; nation building and constitution writing; capital penetration and cultural saturation; the installation of puppet regimes, the formation of clientele political classes, and the organization of proxy armies; the imposition of binding treaties; the establishment of a permanent military base; economic assistance—or not—and diplomatic recognition—or not—as circumstances warranted. And after 1959, trade sanctions, political isolation, covert operations, and economic embargo. All that is American imperialism has been practiced in Cuba.1
The election of Ronald Reagan signaled a return to antagonism in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Cuba. A decade later, the dismantling of Eastern European communism and the evaporation of Soviet subsidies worsened an already bleak economic situation, culminating in the worst material conditions in Cuba since the beginning of the revolution. The Cuban government responded, in survival mode, with austerity policies known as the Special Period. In the early 1990s, a flood of studies confidently proclaimed a deathwatch for the regime. Despite the threat of economic collapse, the elimination of Soviet security guarantees, and the escalation of the United States’ economic embargo, the Castro government remained in power. It continued to demand respect for Cuban sovereignty as a precondition for any negotiations toward normalization with the United States.2 The George H. W. Bush administration sustained the policies of its predecessor, while increasing pressure for its vision of democratic reforms through the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 (popularly known as the Torricelli Act).
The Clinton years saw some tentative overtures and a brief return to Carter-era incremental steps toward normalization—steps that the Castro government viewed as continued attempts to undermine its sovereignty. Electoral politics in the United States combined with a series of international crises to preserve the political impasse. These events resulted in legislation that tightened and further codified the embargo—removing it from presidential purview and giving Congress control over the preconditions for negotiation. These policies could no longer be justified under the national security paradigms of the Cold War. By the 1990s, Cuba terminated significant military support to revolutionary and socialist regimes in Africa and Latin America. Accordingly, new laws were articulated in a moral language that positioned the United States as a defender of democracy and human rights. These notions of moral uplift were not new; they formed a fundamental base of United States policy toward Cuba since the Spanish-American War a century before.3
The reconfiguration of American foreign policy after September 11, 2001, led to heightened antagonism and mutually increased suspicion. The continued presence of Cuba on the State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism combined with portrayals of the Castro regime as an honorary member of the “Axis of Evil.”4 Despite this categorization, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ensured that Cuban policy remained a vague concern, mostly in the hands of powerful anti-Castro domestic interests. The Cuban government, which initially did not object to the imprisonment of terror suspects at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, sympathized with the United States’ experience of terrorism. According to this view, Cubans had been the victims of terrorist attacks launched from U.S. territory since the beginning of the revolution, often with the collusion of U.S. security forces.5 Fidel Castro formally resigned his position as president in 2008, ceding power to his younger brother Raúl, but the fundamental actors and tenets of the government remained.
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 signaled a potential breakthrough, although during his first term little significant movement occurred in the relationship. His second term saw the most significant steps toward normalization since the Carter administration.6 Though important aspects of the embargo still remained toward the end of his second term, such as the general travel ban and trade restrictions, the Obama White House removed Cuba from the State Department’s list of sponsors of international terror and celebrated the reopening of the United States Embassy in Havana in 2015.7 Despite issuing an executive order mandating the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay late in his second term, this campaign promise remained unfulfilled.8 Important disputes, such as the status of fugitives from the United States residing in Cuba and the restitution for property seized by the revolutionary government, remain. A majority of U.S. respondents had been in favor of reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba for nearly every year that information is available (since 1974).9 The inertia of U.S.-Cuban relations is the focal point of this chapter. The 2016 U.S. presidential election, which featured two outspokenly anti-Castro Cuban American candidates, promises to be decisive in the direction of this new opening.10
Movement toward improving relations between Havana and Washington stalled toward the end of Carter’s term. In 1977, as noted in the previous chapter, the administration negotiated the opening of “interest sections” in Havana and Washington. Though these posts were officially hosted by third-country embassies (Switzerland for the United States and Czechoslovakia for Cuba), these reciprocal acts were the most substantial steps toward restoration of diplomatic relations since the closure of the United States embassy in Havana in 1961. Carter also diluted the travel ban and sanctioned direct flights between the United States and Cuba. The Cuban government responded by allowing Cuban Americans to visit the island and releasing nearly 3,000 political prisoners.11 Diplomatic and back channel negotiations toward détente, however, fell victim to a series of external events that revived underlying Cold War alignments.
In November 1979, Iranian students invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two United States citizens hostage. A month later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Cuban government refused to condemn those actions in the United Nations. Despite leadership in the Non-Aligned Movement, an organization that included Afghanistan, Castro was unwilling to criticize the Soviet Union in public. Cuba also maintained its support for socialist governments and revolutionary movements in Nicaragua and Grenada, in addition to its large-scale combat operations in Angola and Ethiopia.12 While the Cuban government argued that their domestic and foreign policies were not subject to negotiation, Washington was in no mood to accept these arguments of sovereignty. The scale of this military assistance was exceeded by Cuban civilian aid, including “construction workers, physicians, technicians, engineers, agronomists, and teachers . . . in nearly 40 countries on three continents.”13 Cuba’s foreign policy, directed from Moscow or not, impeded the necessary Washington consensus for the normalization of relations.
Most historians of Cuba now reject the notion that Cuban troops, advisors, and “civilian internationalists” operated on Moscow’s orders. Historian Piero Gleijeses, examining previously unavailable archives in Havana, has determined that the USSR was often frustrated by its lack of control over Cuban foreign policy.14 This crucial detail—that Cuba pursued a largely independent internationalist strategy—was absent from the Carter administration’s strategic vision.
Bureaucratic competition over the Cuba question, within Carter’s cabinet, further complicated the formulation of coherent policy due to the dual position of the island as a national security risk and a diplomatic conundrum. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argued for an unyielding approach to Cuba as a Soviet client in clear accord with a realist Cold War approach. Secretary of state Cyrus Vance advocated a more flexible and conciliatory line that focused on bilateral relations and negotiation.15 Amid this strategic confusion, it was a manufactured migrant crisis that derailed Carter’s attempts to change the narrative.
In 1979, over 100,000 Cuban Americans visited Cuba. The Carter administration’s loosening of prohibitions on family travel had the largely unintended consequence of showing Cubans the comparative material success of relatives living in the United States. These comparisons were aggravated by economic hardship linked to a dramatic fall in sugar prices and Cuban over-borrowing of cheap petrodollars. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 also gave anyone fleeing the island preferential immigration status as an automatic permanent resident, a policy that Cuban authorities consistently portrayed as a provocation and an inducement for risky and illegal attempts at flight.16 Some Cubans, during 1979 and 1980, attempted to leave the island by seeking asylum in foreign embassies; multiple hijackings of boats and planes by Cubans who hoped to flee only worsened economic and political conditions. Castro labeled those wishing to leave as traitors to the nation and blamed the crisis on the United States for its unique policy toward Cuban migrants. In October 1978 and, again, in February 1980, armed Cubans stole boats and sailed to the United States. In the latter case, sixty-five hijackers forced the captain of a ship, at gunpoint, to take them to the Florida Keys; they were “walking the streets of Miami’s Little Havana by that evening.”17 Media outlets portrayed these illegal actions as brave acts of resistance against tyranny. Ramón Sánchez-Parodi, then head of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, DC, blamed the refusal of the United States government to accept more legal Cuban migrants for the events that followed.18
On April 1 of 1980, a driver crashed a bus through the gates of the Peruvian embassy in a suburb of Havana. The driver and his passengers were promptly granted political asylum by the Peruvian ambassador. In protest, the Cuban government removed its guards at the embassy. Shortly thereafter, over 10,000 Cubans poured into the few acres that constituted Peruvian territory in Cuba. This event proved an embarrassment to the Cuban government as international media published accounts of horrifying conditions that Cubans on the embassy grounds were willing to endure, while waiting to be processed as political refugees and transported from the country. In response, the Cuban government organized a march of nearly one million people in support of the revolution and against those seeking asylum.19
Amid a growing public relations disaster, Castro announced that those wishing to leave would be free to do so through the port of El Mariel, on the northwestern coast. Over the next five months, a makeshift flotilla from Florida, directed by Cuban Americans, evacuated over 125,000 individuals. Ill-prepared to manage this influx, the Carter administration scrambled to house and process the marielitos. Several complications in this improvisational process became domestic political liabilities and exposed divisions within the powerful Cuban exile community in Miami.
Seeing an opportunity to dispose of “undesirables,” the Cuban government had encouraged “hundreds of prison inmates, mental patients, lazy individuals, homosexuals, individuals who refused to work, and religious dissenters” to join the throng headed for Florida.20 The number of criminals was greatly embellished by U.S. media, but critical events, such as the rioting of Cubans relocated and detained in Arkansas, further damaged Carter’s prospects for reelection. Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, would later remember his acceptance of Mariel refugees as a prime factor in the only election he ever lost.21
The Mariel crisis highlighted the costs of mutual antagonism. Since the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, any Cuban who reached U.S. shores was allowed to remain. This unique status stood in contrast to regulations governing other would-be migrants, such as the Haitian “boat people,” who also fled poverty and a repressive regime but enjoyed none of the privileges allotted to Cubans. When Carter ordered the Coast Guard to stem the flow he was criticized from the right by then candidate Ronald Reagan, who questioned the president’s “humanitarianism in shutting that off.”22
Carter’s vacillating policy on Cuba ended with his failure to win reelection. Early in the Reagan administration, rumors of a full-scale U.S. invasion of Cuba prompted renewed military mobilization on the island.23 Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, known as perestroika and glasnost, strained the Soviet relationship with Cuba and threatened to destabilize the foundations of the regime’s survival.
The presidential election of 1980 featured more debate on Cuba than any election since 1960. Ronald Reagan regularly characterized Cuban foreign policy as a sort of “Soviet proxy” which created instability in Central America. Support for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, and alliance with the island of Grenada were proof, for Reagan and secretary of state Alexander Haig, of Cuba’s menace to Washington’s hegemony in its sphere of influence. Reagan denied Cuban membership in the “civilized world.”24 Cuba was “a colony of the Soviet Union”; “owned lock stock and barrel”; a “virus”; and “a roving wolf . . . with hungry eyes and sharp teeth.” Though Haig’s tenure was brief, his solution to the Cuba problem was unambiguous: the United States should turn “that fucking island into a parking lot.”25 In 1982, the State Department included the island on its list of state sponsors of terror for its support of revolutionary, socialist, and national liberation movements, especially those in Central America. That same year, eager to reverse Carter’s initiatives, Reagan reinstated the general travel ban (aside from those visiting relatives).
The Cuban government posed other threats. In November 1983, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration asserted that Fidel Castro was involved in “distributing narcotics to the United States to raise money for subversive activities in Latin America.”26 While acknowledging that the administration did not have legally sustainable proof of these charges, Francis M. Mullen, Jr. reasoned, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.” These allegations established Cuba as a dynamic security threat, both international terrorist and malefactor in the domestic drug war. The Cuban Interests Section’s press officer, Angelo Pino, denied these accusations, citing the numerous Americans in Cuban jails for drug trafficking.27
Despite this rhetorical polarization, by the end of Reagan’s second term the United States had reached agreements based on “mutual interests that could only be advanced by cooperation” on migration and southern Africa policy. From a Cuban perspective, the United States scapegoated them for all instability in Latin America. Accordingly, this erroneous simplification ignored U.S. support for right-wing military dictatorships and its role in the debt crisis that led to the “lost decade” of the 1980s in Latin America.28 By the time George H. W. Bush entered office in 1989, the collapse of eastern European communism had begun to reinvigorate the goals of regime change and replaced those geared toward containment of Cuban influence that had dominated American policy since the Bay of Pigs.
The Cuban government took the Reagan administration’s rhetoric seriously. It strengthened its military while advising allies, such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, to moderate their attitude toward negotiations with Washington. Cuban diplomats renewed talks with Wayne Smith, Chief of the U.S. Interests Section, on multilateral solutions to the civil war in El Salvador. Cuban negotiators, while ostensibly willing to assist in a negotiated settlement, demanded that their Salvadoran allies be part of any negotiation. When Smith forwarded this conciliatory approach from Havana to Washington, he was told that the administration was not interested. Mexican president José López Portillo and his foreign minister Jorge Castañeda also sought to serve as intermediaries, but the administration’s hard-line approach precluded any significant dialogue.
In September 1981, the administration announced plans to establish Radio Martí to broadcast anti-Castro propaganda from Florida. Smith, the most experienced Cuba expert at the State Department, advised against it. He reasoned that such broadcasts would be counterproductive and would have no effect other than to further polarize relations.29 Even after meeting with Cuban vice minister of foreign affairs Ricardo Alarcón and forwarding his offers to mediate the conflict in El Salvador and support free elections, Smith’s council was ignored.
In November, the highest-level meeting between Cuban and U.S. diplomats during the Reagan presidency took place in Mexico City; Alexander Haig and Cuban vice president Carlos Rodríguez sat for talks. Their negotiation followed a familiar script with Haig making demands and Rodríguez questioning Washington’s right to demand anything of a sovereign country as a precondition for talks on normalization. Subsequent meetings in Havana, however, further emphasized Cuban willingness to negotiate their support of rebels in El Salvador and for the Sandinistas—this was the first instance since 1959 that Cuban diplomats accepted compromise with the United States in the formulation of foreign policy. These overtures were ignored as insincere, in secret debriefings, while senior White House officials claimed publicly that the Cubans had never made such overtures. Wayne Smith resigned in protest to what he considered clear mendacity.30
In October of 1983, the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, producer of nutmeg, became the site of the Reagan administration’s first direct military intervention in the Caribbean. Officials declared that U.S. involvement was a matter of national security: Cubans were helping to construct an airstrip that, the CIA advised, could be used to land Soviet military aircraft. The Grenadian government argued that the airstrip was only intended for tourism.31 There were also a number of American medical students studying at a medical college and their safety was a concern to the Reagan administration.
Maurice Bishop’s socialist government had taken power in a 1979 coup. By 1983, it had developed close ties with Nicaragua and Cuba and hosted approximately five hundred Cuban construction workers, under the direction of a British contractor. Alongside these workers were two-dozen military advisors and a host of teachers, doctors, and other technicians. Though the Carter administration had opposed Cuban involvement in Grenada, it had avoided military intervention. It responded with theatrical shows of force, such as naval maneuvers and the landing of nearly 2,000 marines, at the Guantánamo Naval Base.32
On October 25, U.S. Forces invaded Grenada, on the pretext of protecting United States’ medical students from civil unrest, following Bishop’s ouster by more radical elements of his government. Since security officials advised that Grenada was a beachhead for Cuban forces and a staging ground for Soviet expansion, this tiny island became an opportunity to put into action what Reagan intended when he signed National Security Decision Directive 75 earlier in the year. The United States would use military force to regain “credibility” in the face of Soviet aggression.33
The Cuban workers in Grenada were taken by surprise. Before the U.S. Interests Section in Havana could advise the Cuban government about the focus of the intervention, the construction workers acted to defend themselves. Though the workers were not the official targets, in the ensuing confusion and combat, twenty-four Cubans were killed and over fifty were wounded. The airport, which had been so central to the Reagan administration’s justification for invasion, was subsequently completed with aid from the United States. In reaction to these events and to the jingoistic rhetoric from the Reagan administration, Fidel Castro responded in kind, labeling the leadership of the United States “Nazi-fascist barbarians” who were “blinded by their own stupidity” to commit a “monstrous crime” by invading Grenada.34
Reagan’s national security decisions were guided by the assumption that any political movement in Central America and the Caribbean not denounced by the Cubans was directly in their employ and beholden to Moscow. While most administration officials with expertise on El Salvador, for example, argued that the resistance to the brutal oligarchic regime there was composed of a broad array of forces, from religious and student groups to the leftist FMLN (Farabundo Martí Liberation Front or Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), Reagan and his ally in the Senate, archconservative Jesse Helms, confidently pronounced that there were only two sides in El Salvador: communist and anticommunist. Accordingly, Salvadoran guerillas were part of a “larger imperialistic plan” guided by Cuba to “impose a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship.” Robert White, a former ambassador to El Salvador, labeled this reductionism that saw Cuban nefariousness as the root cause of social unrest as “towering nonsense . . . tactically and factually wrong.”35 As political scientist Lars Schoultz has demonstrated, of the thirteen members forming the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America, under Reagan and chaired by Henry Kissinger, none were specialists on Central America.36
Since the Mariel crisis of 1979–1980, the Reagan White House had strained to reach an agreement with Castro on the return of “excludables”: those Cubans with violent criminal records or who were otherwise undesirable. After negotiations stretched into the mid-1980s, Cuba agreed to the repatriation of 2,746 individuals, if they were returned incrementally, in groups of 100 per month. This rare cooperative venture lasted only five months, until the first propaganda transmissions from Radio Martí went live.
Despite this violation of international law, the U.S.-funded radio broadcasts, guided by the CIA and designed to destabilize the Cuban government, went back to 1960. Cuba had reciprocated with transmissions of its own, such as the short-lived Radio Free Dixie, a station run from Cuba by African American civil rights activist Robert F. Williams, who had advocated armed resistance to white supremacist violence in North Carolina.37 Most of these stations, on both sides of the Florida straight, had disappeared by the mid-1970s. During the Reagan administration, a new coalition between civil society and policy makers planned to resurrect the problematic power of radio.
The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), a staunchly anti-Castro lobbying group led by Jorge Mas Canosa, was founded in 1981 and immediately pursued a strategy that led to Cuban American “capture of United States policy toward Cuba.”38 At the end of the Cold War, it stepped into the policy vacuum created when Cuba no longer posed a national security threat. Luis Posada Carriles, a dissident Cuban exile who the Cuban government accuses of terrorism for his role in multiple anti-Castro bombings, has alleged that CANF funded his activities. One of CANF’s other pet projects, Radio Martí, was shepherded through several failed attempts to gain legislative approval by Jesse Helms: “Radio Martí was as much a product of domestic politics as of foreign policy. The station was the top priority of the newly formed Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), a lobbying group of wealthy Miami exiles created to assure that no U.S. president would make concessions to Castro’s Cuba.”39 It finally went on air in 1985. This action resulted in the rollback of the small progress that had been made in the area of immigration.
By the end of Reagan’s second term, concern with Cuba was further curtailed due to the Iran-contra affair. Highly publicized trials of administration officials uncovered arms-for-hostage deals with Iran and the illegal arming of the anti-Sandinista contra forces fighting to overthrow the government in Nicaragua. In this context, administration officials transitioned from justifying Cuba policy in geostrategic and national security terms toward a moral and ethical justification for continued embargo and isolation. The unilateral embargo was unnecessary to contain the spread of communism in the hemisphere; the authoritarian one-party state became the new target of the then nearly thirty-year policy of isolation. Despite several failures to secure a denunciation of the regime for violation of human rights in the United Nations, the Reagan administration continuously compared the Castro government to those of Stalin and Hitler. With customary outrage, Castro pointed out what he viewed as hypocritical U.S. foreign policy: “This is amazing. When we see the excellent relations it has with the military government of Argentina, where thousands of people disappeared; the excellent relations with Pinochet who murdered and caused so many people to disappear; the excellent relations with South Africa, which oppresses twenty-million blacks—I am really amazed.”40 Few in Washington were still alarmed by Moscow’s designs in Latin America, and the Cuban American community was positioning itself to create U.S. policy toward Cuba.41 With fundamental changes in international relations on the horizon, the bilateral relationship between Cuba and the United States remained paralyzed.
The series of events that led to the end of communism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance presented the Castro government with its most dire existential crisis to date. This trend continued in Latin America, where the Nicaraguan Sandinistas suffered electoral defeat in 1990. Most observers of Cuba predicted the rapid demise of the moribund regime.42
By the late 1980s, the Soviet bloc provided nearly 85 percent of Cuban trade and subsidized 90 percent of the island’s energy needs. Between 1989 and 1992, the volume of crucial imports plummeted. Food production decreased in some sectors by 80 percent, and the economy, as a whole, shrank by over 40 percent.43 These contractions were compounded by dramatic increases in world prices for subsistence imports such as wheat, chicken, milk, and petroleum; prices for Cuban exports such as nickel and sugar dropped by 25 percent.44 As historian Louis Pérez, Jr. argues, “The rise of market economies in eastern Europe had calamitous consequences in Cuba.”45 The complex series of trade agreements with the Soviet bloc had underwritten the economic survival of the government, but it was not the decline of communism taking place in Eastern Europe alone that accounted for Cuba’s economic crisis. The eighties had been a disastrous decade for the island’s economy. Heavy borrowing of petrodollars had led to several defaults on loan payments, credit downgrades, and low sugar prices were aggravated by stifling production inefficiencies, obsolete infrastructure, and the continuing U.S. economic embargo. Cuba survived, in part, by selling highly subsidized, surplus Soviet oil on the international market. This measure alone could not provide the Castro government with enough exchangeable currency to service its growing debt. With the fall of the Soviet Union, even this tenuous source of revenue disappeared.
In the early 1990s, press accounts, along with Bush administration interpretations of events on the island, confidently predicted the downfall of Fidel Castro.46 Bumper stickers in Miami read “Christmas in Havana,” to express the confidence among Cuban Americans that the government was in its final days.47 President George H. W. Bush was certain: “Castro will not survive this . . . I’m not going to change American policy. We will not lighten up. We are going to stay with it.”48
Fidel Castro drew one clear lesson from events in Eastern Europe: Any concessions toward market reforms would inexorably lead to the downfall of his government and the loss of Cuban sovereignty. Perestroika and glasnost, accordingly, were errors. The answer was to dig in further, call for belt-tightening amid growing material scarcity, and return to moral over material incentives for collective action. This policy was a rollback of nascent economic reforms, such as allowing farmers’ markets, introduced in the late seventies and early eighties. This process came to be known as the “rectification of errors and negative tendencies.”49
Both Castro and George H. W. Bush refused to amend the intransigent approach of the previous decade under Reagan. Washington, however, now accelerated its plans for regime change.50 Every presidential administration since Eisenhower had spoken out against the dictatorial nature of the government in Cuba. The Bush administration, however, became the first to demand political transition as a precondition for any improvement in relations.51 Avoiding substantial bilateral talks, Bush opted to put pressure on Mikhail Gorbachev to end the aid and trade infusion, which amounted to roughly five billion dollars per year. On multiple occasions, the U.S. president made this alteration of Soviet economic policy a precondition for desperately needed U.S. aid to the Soviet economy. Gorbachev and, later, Boris Yeltsin, courted this assistance. By 1992, virtually all aid to Cuba, from the former USSR and the eastern bloc, along with all remaining military personnel, evaporated. Cuba, echoing big power negotiations over the fate of the island over the last century, was not consulted, and learned of these policy changes via press releases of the meetings between secretary of state James Baker and Soviet/Russian leaders.
When the Castro government did not immediately collapse of its own weight and the continued economic embargo, CANF’s leader, Jorge Mas Canosa, shepherded legislation to hasten “regime change.” The Torricelli Bill was signed into law as the Cuban Democracy Act in 1992. Robert Torricelli, a U.S. Representative from New Jersey, had taken over as chair of the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs and had close ties with the anti-Castro CANF in a state with a high concentration of Cuban American voters. The law, introduced as an ideologically driven defense of “human rights and democratic values,” was intended to make material scarcity even more unbearable for Cubans. This would, ostensibly, create a critical mass of discontent necessary to delegitimize the Cuban government and lead transition to a neoliberal regime, directed and supported by the United States. The method proposed to reach this shift was to implement prohibitions against overseas subsidiaries of American companies doing business in Cuba. In 1975, Gerald Ford had allowed these subsidiaries to obtain licenses from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to conduct business with Cuba. The reasoning was clear: strangling the Cuban economy was not worth the potential risk to other U.S. international relationships by imposition of extraterritorial laws that sought to dictate the trade policy of its allies. In the context of the Cold War, it had made little sense to try to bully sovereign nations to achieve policy goals against Cuba.
Since the revocation of Soviet subsidies, the volume of this trade had nearly doubled to roughly $705 million. Mr. Mas Canosa and CANF, along with their chief allies in the House and Senate, Representative Torricelli and Senators Helms (NC) and Graham (FL), now controlled this aspect of U.S. foreign policy. The New York Times, in a 1992 profile of Mas Canosa, accurately displayed the ambiguity of his effect on Cuban and Latin American policies for both parties. As Bill Clinton and George Bush courted his approval in pursuit of the Cuban American vote, he was “Statesman to some, bully to others.”52 Proponents of the law likened it to policies that brought about the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa.53 These views overlooked that Cuban forces had fought in Angola and supported Namibia against South Africa and that the embargo against the racialist government was a multilateral United Nations action—not a unilateral embargo like the one against Cuba. This type of reasoning was exemplar of the post–Cold War shift back to the U.S. role as a mediator of democracy for “lesser nations.” Compromise and debate was now a legal impossibility. As one Cuban diplomat wrote, “if Reagan killed normalization, Bush and his allies were its grave diggers.”54
The new law went beyond commercial relations and further restricted travel from the United States to Cuba. It authorized OFAC to level civil penalties of up to $50,000 for violations of the travel ban. The Cuban Democracy Act also allowed OFAC to sidestep the Justice Department—with its presumption of innocence—to facilitate penalizing those violating the travel ban. As Lars Schoultz demonstrates, this violation of Sixth Amendment rights also disregarded the right of U.S. citizens to travel, in exercise of their First Amendment rights as established by the Supreme Court in 1969.55
While the Cuban Democracy Act allowed the U.S. president some latitude on enforcement, it set preconditions on the nature of change in Cuba: “the law now stipulated what constituted a free and fair election, and Cuba’s acceptance of that blueprint represented a nonnegotiable demand: the president was authorized to lift or waive the sanctions when—and only when—Cuba capitulated . . . [and] added the requirement that Cuba accept the prevailing U.S. blueprint of how an economy should be organized, stipulating that sanctions could not be waived unless Cuba ‘is moving toward establishing a free market economic system.’”56 The United States now expanded its self-designated power over Cuba into the realm of defining its future economic philosophy.
Though George H. W. Bush showed some reluctance to sign the Cuban Democracy Act, domestic politics in an election year prevailed. The strategic importance of Mas Canosa and the Cuban American vote overrode clear indications that U.S. allies would be ruffled by the extraterritorial stipulations that demanded U.S. jurisdiction over companies operating within their boundaries. While Bush wavered, his opponent, democrat Bill Clinton, was certain. If elected president, he would sign the act into law. On the campaign trail, he labeled Bush as too accommodating on Cuba. Fearing the loss of the Cuban American vote in the crucial state of Florida, Bush flew to Miami where he signed the Cuban Democracy Act, in front of Mas Canosa and his CANF associates, a week before the 1992 election.57 Bush won Florida by a margin of 100,000 votes, down from the 500,000 that had given him easy victory in 1988. Despite losing in Florida, Bill Clinton became president and would have to wrestle with Cuba for the next eight years.
No longer a security threat, the government of Fidel Castro was thus characterized by Washington as a political relic, a sore loser unable to accept defeat, and a dictatorship that egregiously violated the human rights of its citizens. Clinton had made two trips to Miami’s “Little Havana” to tout his “anti-Castro credentials.” After a private meeting with Clinton, Jorge Mas Canosa outraged Republicans by announcing that any fear he may have had about Clinton’s militancy against Castro had “dissipated.”58 The radical changes in international politics over the preceding decade had firmly ensconced Cuban policy as a domestic electoral issue.59
During his confirmation hearings, nominee for Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, was questioned by Jesse Helms about the new administration’s intentions toward Cuba in general and the Cuban Democracy Act in particular. Christopher responded that the current course inherited from the Bush administration needed no revision. This view was seconded by Anthony Lake, the new national security advisor, who characterized Cuba as one of five “outlaw states” whose existence was an assault on the “basic values” of the family of nations.60 This novel focus on domestic political and economic transformations in Cuba and the salience of CANF as a clearinghouse for the important Cuban American vote framed Clinton’s policies. Pressure from CANF was successful in sinking nominations for important cabinet posts and in dominating any discussion of Cuba in Washington.
Despite CANF efforts, an unlikely coalition of Democrats including representative Charles Rangel (D-NY) and farm state agricultural interests, hoping to capture Cuban demand for staple food products, began to call for adjustments in the economic embargo. Perhaps fearing a shift in consensus on the draconian isolation of Cuba, terrorist groups like the Miami-based Alpha-66 pledged to attack any Cuban Americans who tried to visit the island. These threats were backed up with the firebombing of a company that directed charter flights to Havana and several bombings of tourist targets in Havana during the 1990s.
As economic conditions in Cuba deteriorated in the early- to mid-1990s, the government was forced to implement important changes in economic policy in order to ease the material scarcities that plagued daily life. Taking advantage of the flow of cash remittances from relatives in the United States, Cuba legalized the use of the U.S. dollar and allowed for some small-scale private businesses, such as family restaurants known as paladares and agricultural markets where farmers were permitted to sell surplus produce. The government also refocused long-term investment in tourism—creating joint ventures with European and Canadian companies to attract the sun and sand and curiosity-seekers, who brought hard currency to the island.
The most important legislative action during the Clinton years was the Helms-Burton Act. It was largely penned by wealthy Cuban American interests, such as Bacardí and the National Association of Sugar Mill Owners, and built upon the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992. The most controversial aspect of Helms-Burton was its extraterritoriality and its ex post facto–granting of some citizenship rights to Cuban Americans. Its authors sought to sanction and penalize any foreign investor or corporation that invested in Cuban property that had been expropriated by the revolutionary government. Amazingly, the bill called for protection of Cuban American property rights “whether or not the United States national qualified as a United States national at the time of the Cuban government action.”61 For U.S. legislators, the most troubling aspect of the law was its perceived aggression against third-country corporations. Not only did it potentially extend the jurisdiction of U.S. courts into the sovereign territory of several European allies, it threatened to deny U.S. entry visas to employees of any foreign corporation not abiding by the dictates of that law. Importantly, Helms-Burton also stipulated over a dozen preconditions for any negotiation toward normalization.
While this bill worked its way through Congress toward the end of 1995, Clinton announced a series of measures to loosen travel restrictions and to fund and encourage the fledgling civil society in Cuba. On February 24, 1996, the Cuban air force shot down two American civilian airplanes over Cuban airspace. The planes and pilots belonged to an organization called Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban American group that had begun flights in the early 1990s over the Florida Strait to locate and rescue endangered migrants/rafters. After the balsero crisis had subsided, the pilots shifted their focus, regularly violating Cuban airspace and dropping pro-democracy pamphlets over Havana. Between 1995 and 1996, the Cuban government lodged multiple formal complaints with the United States, making it clear that its patience for these acts of provocation would not last forever. On February 24, 1996, the Cuban Air Force made good on its threats, shooting down two planes and killing four U.S. citizens. Prompted by public outrage over this event, a clear violation of international law in response to intentionally provocative flights that were also a clear violation of international law, Clinton put aside his objections to Helms-Burton and gave his full backing to even the most controversial extraterritorial provisions. In signing the bill, the president also abandoned executive control over the embargo: For the first time, it was codified into federal law; it would now take congressional action to overturn it. Neither Clinton nor his advisors had clearly understood the ramifications of this surrender of executive control. Years later, Clinton remembered that the decision, made regretfully, was good election-year politics (1996), and it likely helped deliver Florida for the Democrats for the first time since 1976.62 Since the Kennedy administration, the embargo had been maintained by executive order. As the polarization of the Cold War faded, Helms-Burton illustrated the shift from containment to regime change.
The final episode of Clinton-era Cuban policy played out around the fate of a seven-year-old Cuban boy who was rescued, by fishermen, floating on an inner tube in the Florida Strait. In November 1999, Elían González’s mother and others drowned while attempting to escape Cuba to join relatives in Miami. González’s father, who had not known of his ex-wife’s plan, immediately sought to have his son returned to Cuba. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had temporarily placed the boy with relatives in Miami. The Miami relatives were loathe to return the angelic Elián to communist Cuba. The father, Juan Miguel, a hard-working party loyalist and—by all accounts—loving father accused the relatives of kidnapping. The ensuing battle over repatriation worked its way through the courts. Media coverage revealed the intensity of anti-Castro sentiment among the powerful Cuban American community, as it fought to intercede in order to grant Elián asylum. The months-long saga also provided a national cause for the Cuban government. Even with material scarcities of the Special Period, thousands of shirts bearing the image of the boy’s face and the slogan “Let’s save Elián” were distributed at rallies in Cuba. When the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, INS agents stormed his relatives’ Miami home, providing one of the most iconic photographs of the Cuban-U.S. relationship: Law enforcement officers, fully armed with riot gear, pulling a terrified child from a closet and out of the arms (literally) of the Miami relatives. Even though a majority of Americans were in favor of returning Elián to his father, CANF waged an all-out propaganda war against it.63 The political costs of repatriation were high. Bill Clinton suggests in his memoir that the decision to reunite Elián with his father likely cost Al Gore the state of Florida and the presidency in 2000.64 Though Clinton had eased some restrictions on people-to-people contact in an attempt to strengthen civil society, the weight of Helms-Burton further tipped the scales toward the continued isolation of Cuba.
The Cuban government’s reaction to the election of George W. Bush and his two terms in office was unambiguous. For Sánchez-Parodi, Bush was “perhaps the most inept president the northern nation has ever had.”65
Bush’s tenuous victory in the 2000 presidential elections gave conservative Cuban Americans control of Cuba policy as a reward for support during the campaign. According to Lars Schoultz, these highly placed political operators within the State Department and on the National Security Council all had “deep ties to the anti-Castro world.” Thinking ahead to the 2004 elections, it was clear that Bush would need a strong showing in Florida and was willing to deliver Cuba policy to the loudest Cuban American voices:
The result of these calculations was obvious: after the 2000 election, Cuban Americans were handed U.S. policy toward Cuba in the same way that agricultural interests have traditionally received U.S. farm policy—not unchecked, of course, but allowed to go one step beyond the high-level lobbying access that Cuban immigrants had earned after two decades of generous campaign contributions and solid bloc voting . . . and while the political beliefs of the Cuban-American community were becoming increasingly diverse, such was not the case for the conservatives appointed by President Bush.66
Secretary of state Colin Powell made clear his disdain for Fidel Castro and his regime, but beyond ad hominem verbal attacks on the Cuban leader as “an aging starlet” and “a relic,” there was little discussion of plans to actively precipitate the fall of the regime. Cuba was largely irrelevant as a foreign policy issue; it had become a domestic political focus. These conditions emerged when the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001.
In the post-9/11 context, the designation of Cuba as a sponsor of terrorism became increasingly unjustifiable. Even with an official policy of antagonism, U.S. agricultural interests were gaining momentum toward normalization of commercial relations by successful circumvention of the embargo on food sales to the island. Leaders representing the farm lobby, Republican and Democrat, argued that U.S. policy unfairly hindered the free market and trade with the largest island in the Caribbean. Combined with the Bush administration’s pledge to allow food aid for Cuba in the aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Michelle in late 2001, these important shifts created a bipartisan pathway forward. In 2002, a number of Republican senators, along with former president Jimmy Carter, traveled to Cuba and came back with firsthand accounts of Cuba that encouraged greater dialogue. During his trip, Carter was allowed to address the Cuban public with no preconditions on the content of his remarks. He praised dissident Cubans while calling for an end to the embargo. In 1999, a group of aging Cuban musicians named the “Buena Vista Social Club” were introduced to the American public and received enormous acclaim for their music and the documentary portrayal of their lives. Despite this economic and cultural engagement, the politics of inertia continued to dominate the relationship.
Bush moved to reapply strict prohibitions on travel to Cuba. His administration, through the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), began stepping up fines for those thought to have traveled illegally to the island—reversing the lax and unfunded enforcement during the Clinton years. U.S. citizens were free to travel to almost any other country. Libertarians and Democrats joined to question this policy, which Jimmy Carter had called “an imposition on the human rights of American citizens.” As the 2004 election approached, Bush unveiled the focal point of his Cuba policy in an attempt to hold on to the Cuban American vote: The Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba.
The 2004 report, authored by the Council on Foreign Relations, reserved for the United States the right to define the nature of Cuba’s future. The central tenets of the plan were for free elections (unless the results did not fit Washington’s model), a neoliberal market economy, and the provision of U.S. subsidies. Far from novel, the presumption that the political and economic models approved by Washington were best for Cubans followed those patterns that began in the nineteenth century. These latest recommendations focused on further tightening the embargo and supporting Cuban dissident and civic social organizations on the island.
New restrictions on travel and remittances most directly affected Cuban Americans who could now visit the island once every three years (instead of yearly), could only bring forty-four pounds of luggage, and were limited to spending fifty dollars per day. The new policy also cut down on academic and person-to-person exchanges. The second strategy—to destabilize the government by supporting internal dissent—was funded by millions of dollars dedicated to strengthening Radio and TV Martí, and a range of other initiatives designed to foster discontent into organized resistance to the government. Though several of these initiatives built on Clinton-era policies, the Bush administration ramped up enforcement and funding for often highly questionable expenditures, ostensibly dedicated to hastening the transition.67
Under James Cason, the U.S. Cuban Interests Section became a node for distributing pro-democracy literature and thousands of shortwave radios to Cuban dissidents. It provided on-site Internet via a rooftop satellite connection, allowing a few Cubans to bypass stringent access restrictions. USAID focused on multiple projects designed to provide Cubans with information technologies that would allow them to access the Internet. In 2005, Cason’s replacement, Michael Parmly, inaugurated a large electronic billboard across the entire side of the Interests Section. The sign criticized the Cuban government and reproduced pro-democracy quotations. Enraged, the Cuban government responded by raising 138 black flags, which blocked the billboard. The relationship between the United States and Cuba had been brought to its most sophomoric level.
In July of 2006, after emergency intestinal surgery, Fidel Castro handed power to his younger brother Raúl. Speculation on the elder Castro’s imminent death ran wild as conservative Cuban Americans danced in the Miami streets.68 Raúl Castro, in one of his first major speeches as president, called for dialogue with the United States. Even though many commentators again predicted the sure demise of the socialist regime, his words could have been cut and pasted from the 1960s, with an offer of negotiation “based on the principles of equality, reciprocity, noninterference, and mutual respect.”69 Bush’s policies had been designed to hasten a transition to democracy in Cuba. Despite the millions of dollars spent and the provocative antics of the U.S. Interests Section, none of these major objectives were accomplished. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the epochal global war on terror made Cuban policy a relatively unimportant curiosity. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he carried the state of Florida. Despite criticizing the “failed policy with Cuba for the last fifty years,” he promised to promote democracy there as the centerpiece of his approach.
Obama’s victory in Florida showed that the unyielding hard-line on Cuba was no longer necessary to win the state’s twenty-seven electoral votes. Following the election, Cubans wore t-shirts that bore the U.S. president’s image, portrayed in a laudatory light, on the streets of Havana—a public display of affection that would have been unthinkable during the previous eight years. Other Latin American governments bore high hopes that a changing stance toward Cuba would signal a renewed willingness to engage the rest of the region on the basis of equal sovereignty. At the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, the electronic billboard went dark. The administration lifted the more draconian travel restrictions on academic and cultural exchanges, and for those with family on the island. It opened negotiations on migration that had been suspended since 2004. Despite these overtures, Cuba remained on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, and the general travel ban continued. The administration still funded “semi-covert” democracy promotion, a holdover from the Bush years, to the tune of $20 million annually for both 2009 and 2010. Obama also continued several USAID programs designed to hasten a democratic transition. At the end of his first year in office, despite rhetoric to the contrary, Cuba policy was still more restrictive than it had been under Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.70
Secretary of state Hillary Clinton continued to call on Cuba to democratize, release political prisoners, and model its society more closely on blueprints from Washington. The Cuban government, unsurprisingly, critiqued these demands; Raúl Castro portrayed them as domestic political rewards for Cuban American support, and reminded anyone who would listen that the economic embargo remained in place. Washington continued to call for “Net Freedom” in Cuba, reasoning that social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook constituted important public spaces and that the ability to access them was a modern form of free assembly rights. This conviction increased in 2011, with the series of events known as the Arab Spring. These pro-democracy movements in the Middle East and North Africa relied heavily on social media to organize protests and criticize governments. Dissident Cuban bloggers, such as Yoani Sánchez, were embraced by the Obama administration as the symbol of its vision for a new and critical generation of Cuban dissidents using the Internet to undermine the political monopoly on the media.
Amid these novel forces, the old relationship persisted. In December 2009, Alan Gross, a contractor funded by USAID to distribute communications technologies and set up clandestine Internet access, was arrested by Cuban agents on his fifth trip to the island. Likely prodded by the growing popularity and international clout of dissident bloggers, Raúl Castro cited Gross’ actions as proof of the continued attempts by Washington to overthrow the Cuban government. The United States responded by demanding Gross’ release before any further talks on normalization could continue. Following this well-established pattern of détente and rupture, this seemed like more of the same. Despite these forebodings, Obama’s second term saw the most significant changes in U.S. policy since the beginning of the Cuban Revolution.
These events occurred in relatively rapid succession. After over a year of secret mediation brokered by Pope Francis I, the United States and Cuba announced plans for the restoration of diplomatic relations on December 17, 2014. These announcements were accompanied by a prisoner swap in which the Cuban government released Mr. Gross and a CIA officer in return for the three remaining Cubans convicted of espionage in the late 1990s. In May 2015, the State Department dropped Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, for the first time in over thirty years. After further negotiations, the U.S. Interests Section reopened in August 2015 as the U.S. Embassy, more than fifty-four years after its closure. In his speech at the flag-raising ceremony, secretary of state John Kerry remarked that both leaders, Obama and Castro, had agreed to “stop being the prisoners of history.” While sounding this hopeful note, he also added that “the United States will always remain a champion of democratic principles and reforms,” and further impugned the Cuban government to mold its society on principles held by “every other country in the Americas.”
By early 2016, the Obama administration had reached the limit to what it could do without a congressional vote to repeal the Helms-Burton law, which had codified the embargo under Bill Clinton. Its stipulations prohibited lifting the economic embargo unless Cuba underwent domestic reforms and democratization. Mr. Obama’s second term overtures also had unintended consequences. Due to the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, Cuban migrants received preferential treatment and were allowed permanent resident status if they reached U.S. soil. Prompted by movement toward normalization and the fear that they would no longer receive special treatment, thousands of migrants have left the island, taking circuitous and often dangerous paths to reach the United States. While thousands of migrants from other impoverished Latin American nations such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were deported from the United States or turned away at the border, Cubans received asylum.71 This policy, among several idiosyncrasies born of the U.S.-Cuban relationship, is unlikely to change in the near future.
As of this writing, the most important determining factor in the future of this diplomatic relationship which has so often served as a microcosm of U.S.-Latin American relations will be the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. One of the Republican candidates, senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is vehemently anti-Castro and portrays the Cuban government as an evil pariah. He pledged to reverse many of Barack Obama’s executive actions if successful in winning the election. Both candidates on the Democratic side, senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, have called for a continuation of diplomatic détente and an end to the economic embargo. They also agree on the need to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, an important stumbling block both in the bilateral relationship and in the perception of U.S. foreign policy in the broader world.
During March 21–23, Barack Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Cuba since 1928. At that time, President Coolidge had disembarked on an island still legally bound by the Platt amendment to truncated sovereignty under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. In 2016, Cuba remained under economic embargo and subject to the dictatorship of a one-party state. Appearing at a joint press conference with the eighty-four-year-old Raúl Castro, President Obama struck a conciliatory tone and looked to build on the openings initiated during his second term. He sought to defuse some of the volatile issues of previous negotiations while restating the standard U.S. critique of the regime: “Cuba’s destiny will not be decided by the United States or any other country. . . . but the U.S. will continue to speak out on behalf of democracy and human rights.”72 Raúl Castro’s remarks impugned what he labeled U.S. hypocrisy on this important issue: “We find it inconceivable that a government does not defend and secure the right to healthcare, equal pay and the rights of children. We oppose political double standards in the approach of human rights.”
Though images of Barack Obama and Raúl Castro saturated the front pages of newspapers around the world, implying further reconciliation, the Cuban government continued to demand a return of Guantánamo Bay and a complete lifting of the U.S. economic embargo before full normalization. A few days after these events, Fidel Castro, who had not met with Obama during the visit, responded with a critique of the American’s message that gives insight into the continuing impasse. His article, published in the Communist Party newspaper, the Granma, quoted Obama’s message: “It is time, now, for us to leave the past behind.” Castro bristled at Obama’s dismissal of the role of history in the present and located Cuban dignity in the accomplishments of the past. Mr. Castro wrote, “all of us were at risk of a heart attack upon hearing these words from the President of the United States.”73 The history of the relationship remains as contested as its future.
1. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 1.
2. Ramón Sánchez-Parodi, Cuba-USA: Diez tiempos de una relación (México D.F.: Ocean Sur, 2011).
3. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008).
4. J. R. Bolton, “Beyond the Axis of Evil: Additional Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Heritage Lecture No. 743, May 6, 2002. Online. Available: http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/beyond-the-axis-of-evil (accessed December 26, 2015); Nigel D. White, The Cuban Embargo Under International Law: El Bloqueo (New York: Routledge Press, 2015), 79.
5. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. xiv; Keith Bolender, Voices from the Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism against Cuba (London: Pluto, 2010).
6. Jeff Zeleny, “Obama, in Miami, Calls for Engaging With Cuba,” The New York Times, May 24, 2008.
7. Jeff Rathke, “Rescission of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism,” Department of State Press Release, May 29, 2015. Online. Available:http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2015/05/242986.htm (accessed December 27, 2015); John Kerry, “Remarks at Flag Raising Ceremony,” Department of State, August 14, 2015. Online. Available: http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2015/08/246121.htm (accessed December 27, 2015).
8. Mattathias Schwartz, “Is Obama Serious About Closing Guantánamo?” The New Yorker, January 22, 2016.
9. Gallup Poll, “Do you favor or oppose re-establishing U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba?” Data available from 1975–2015. Online. Available:http://www.gallup.com/poll/1630/cuba.aspx (accessed January 4, 2016). No reliable statistics exist for Cuban opinions on the same question.
10. Lizette Alvarez and Manny Fernandez, “Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz Diverge in Approach to Their Hispanic Identity,” The New York Times, December 16, 2015.
11. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course and Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 119–23.
12. Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
13. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 300.
14. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions; Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
15. Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), chap. 10.
16. “Illegal exits” were defined by the Cuban government as any flight without prior exit visa. Another type of illegal emigration that caused diplomatic friction was the hijacking of Cuban boats and airplanes to the United States. These sometimes involved killings and other violent crimes.
17. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 354.
18. See Sánchez-Parodi, Cuba-USA.
19. Luis Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba: A History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 157–63.
20. Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 160.
21. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 469.
22. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 359–60.
23. Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 302.
24. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 362.
25. William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 225.
26. Leslie Maitland Werner, “U.S. Officials Link Castro and Drugs,” The New York Times, November 10, 1983.
27. Werner, “U.S. Officials Link Castro and Drugs.”
28. Sánchez-Parodi, Cuba-USA, 197.
29. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 226–27.
30. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 226–27.
31. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 390–91.
32. Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 150–51.
33. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 390–91.
34. Stephen Kinzer, “Castro Denounces Reagan in Speech,” New York Times, January 3, 1984.
35. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 388–89.
36. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 389–90.
37. Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), chap. 8.
38. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 402.
39. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 245.
40. Quoted in Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 417.
41. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 418.
42. Andrés Oppenheimer, Castro’s Final Hour: An Eyewitness Account of the Disintegration of Castro’s Cuba (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
43. Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 304–05.
44. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 429.
45. Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution 304.
46. Clifford Krauss, “The Last Stalinist,” New York Times, February 10, 1991.
47. Susan Kaufman Purcell, “Cuba’s Cloudy Future,” Foreign Affairs 69, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 130–45.
48. United States, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, George Bush: July 1 to December 31, 1991 (Washington, DC: U.S. G.P.O., 1992), 1495.
49. Susan Eckstein, “The Rectification of Errors or the Errors of the Rectification Process in Cuba,” Cuban Studies 20 (1990): 67–85.
50. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 424–25.
51. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 266.
52. Larry Rohter, “A Rising Cuban-American Leader: Statesman to Some, Bully to Others,” The New York Times, October 29, 1992.
53. United States, The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, S. 2918: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere and Peace Corps Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, One Hundred Second Congress, Second Session, August 5, 1992 (Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1992), 62.
54. Sánchez-Parodi, Cuba-USA, 203.
55. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, chap. 12.
56. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 451.
57. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 271.
58. Larry Rohter, “The 1992 Campaign: Florida; Clinton Sees Opportunity to Break G.O.P Grip on Cuban-Americans,” The New York Times, October 31, 1992.
59. Jessica F. Gibbs, US Policy Towards Cuba: Since the Cold War (Milton Park, NY: Routledge, 2011), p. 27–55.
60. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, chap. 13.
61. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 478.
62. Bill Clinton, My Life, Volume II: The Presidential Years (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 310.
63. Lorena G. Barberia, “U.S. Immigration Policies Toward Cuba,” in Jorge I. Domínguez, Rafael Hernández, and Lorena G. Barbeira, eds., Debating U.S.-Cuban Relations: Shall We Play Ball? (New York: Routledge, 2012), 180–201.
64. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 515.
65. Sánchez-Parodi, Cuba-USA, 215.
66. Sánchez-Parodi, Cuba-USA, 516.
67. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 546–47.
68. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 365.
69. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 366.
70. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 372.
71. Jonathan Blitzer, “The Cuban Migrant Crisis,” The New Yorker, January 16, 2016.
72. Dan Roberts and Jonathan Watts, “Castro Demands Return of Guantánamo Bay During Historic Obama Visit,” The Guardian, March 21, 2016.
73. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Brother Obama” Granma, March 28, 2016.