Behind the Embargo

By Michelle Collins
Embassy, April 29, 2009

If it weren't so well-documented, one might think it little more than an exaggerated battle of wills, a test of perseverance between big and small.

Instead, it is a curious truth that for five decades, the small island nation of Cuba, with 11 million people and in the hands of an indefatigable dictator who employed the most bizarre of tactics to maintain his grip on power, has resisted the world's most powerful nation.

In The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution, author Daniel P. Erikson delves into the long and twisted political relationship between the United States and Cuba, both past and present. Through personal travels and interviews, Mr. Erikson explores the factors that continue to hinder peace, 50 years since the Cuban Revolution, and how the U.S. might react when its 82-year-old leader, Fidel Castro, dies.

Mr. Castro, who has presided over a communist Cuba since 1959, has outlived 10 U.S. presidents and survived an estimated 600 assassination attempts, many of them orchestrated by the U.S. government.

As Mr. Erikson describes it, even in the years since Fidel Castro's health worsened, and in the one year since power was transferred over to his brother Raul Castro, the frostiness that has long defined relations between the U.S. and Cuba since 1962 remains chillingly divisive.

Although it has long remained on the periphery of Washington's foreign policy, Mr. Erikson successfully makes the case that Cuba is increasingly taking centre stage, in large part because the "Cuba lobby" has become an influential force in Florida's electorate.

Indeed, one of the book's more relevant insights is to outline just how effective a diaspora community—in this case the Cuban exiles living in Miami—has been in affecting U.S. domestic and foreign politics.

Mr. Erikson has produced a well-written book that easily carries the reader through the complicated politics by telling the stories of its most interesting actors. Insightful accounts are offered up by the likes of Organization of the Americas President José Miguel Insulza, filmmaker Oliver Stone, and the many influential Cuban exiles continuously shaping Miami's society.

There remains a U.S. Interests Section in Havana, with a Cuban counterpart in Washington, acting as de-facto diplomatic missions. Weather and coast guard officials regularly co-operate, and remittances sent from the U.S. are significant.

Mr. Erikson's chronicling of the Bush administration's policies toward Cuba are particularly telling and reveal that the War on Terror convinced Cuba's officials that, as a rogue state, it was under imminent threat of attack—nerve-racking for the Cubans but laughable to U.S. army generals who had their hands full in Iraq.

In part to pander to Cuban Americans—most of whom want to see Mr. Castro overthrown in the name of democracy—the Bush administration pursued aggressive policies and spent millions encouraging democratic reform in Cuba while tightening the embargo. Travel by exiles was restricted to once every three years, and the gifts and cash permitted were drasitically limited—a move that actually outraged many.

But as with every policy that touches Cuba, and likely why the Cold War-era tension has frozen relations for so long, self-interests cloud such efforts. One former White House aide tells Mr. Erikson that the Cuba grants do little more than funnel cash back to congressional campaigns, and in some cases even into the personal coffers of political staff.

For the Canadian reader, there are but a few mentions of the northern country and its role in Cuban affairs; this is a book about the Latin American country's ongoing saga with the U.S., and on this Mr. Erikson does a formidable job.

By the end, the reader has been granted a peek into Fidel Castro's seemingly indelible regime, the web of spies involved, and the country's ties to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

And while one Cuban offers Mr. Erikson a sorrowful account of how Cubans are but conditioned to take what is offered rather than to self-empower and choose for themselves, Mr. Erikson is positively hopeful for a new revolution that will one day pave the way for a better Cuba.

mcollins@embassymag.ca