The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy (review)

From the early 1960s until today, the United States has had an embargo (or one might better say an unbroken series of "embargoes," given the variation in the policy) on trade and investment in Cuba. By the 1980s, the politically organized sector of the Cuban community living in the United States made the intensification of this boycott a matter of faith. Neither of the two main political parties has dared to propose a significant change in this approach, although both parties, as the book under review substantiates, have cheated. The story of the embargo (or embargoes) is the subject of the book.

At the most basic level the book succeeds admirably. In clear expository prose that eschews social science jargon, the two authors lay out the history and the vicissitudes of embargo policy. Their first chapter covers in just twenty pages the story of four administrations—from Dwight Eisenhower through Jimmy Carter. We are treated here to potted history, though for a good reason.

For beginning with the years under Ronald Reagan, the plot thickens. No longer was the U.S. government acting on its own. With the creation of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) at the suggestion of the Reagan campaign team in 1980, the large Cuban-American community began to gain a salient role in domestic politics and was increasingly able, especially through CANF, to act independently of the Republican Party that created it. To be sure, the ties between the national Republican apparatus and the Cuban-American community in Florida remain strong to this day, but the ability of the community to evolve in its own manner is a compelling element of this saga.

In addition to seeing the presidency and the community in action, Patrick Haney and Walt Vanderbush are also sensitive to the role of Congress, which they see as having become stronger after the Cold War, during the administration of George H. W. Bush. The "imperial presidency" was in decline after the Cold War, and the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue was picking up the pieces. Yet at the same time that the executive weakened in power, so did the ability of the Cuban-American community to speak with a monolithic voice.

This short, readable book is to be recommended to those who want a cogent and informed review of Cuban-American activism as it evolved over time along with a sense of the variation in the structure of power in Washington, DC. The authors keep four balls in the air at the same time: the presidency, the Congress, the Cuban-American community of Florida, and the policies these three constituencies tussled over.

On other fronts, however, this reviewer wishes that the authors had done more to elucidate four issues from a comparative perspective. First, I wish they had looked more extensively at electoral politics. Take, for example, the level of Florida politics or national politics in general. True, in a few places the authors do recognize that Florida state politics is worthy of discussion, but the scattered paragraphs on this matter contain not a word about a subject of special importance: the way the party and electoral voting systems in the United States give to what is, after all, a small minority a large voice if they choose to use it. The same is true of campaign contributions, which again the authors mention but without the comparative analysis that could have set this community into clearer perspective. If, for example, I were working in a political campaign in Florida I would not be sure from this study just how to handle the Cuban-American community in terms of its financial or voting strength. Nor would I understand how appeals to the community might be formulated.

Second, much of the same general criticism can be made of the authors' treatment of ethnic lobbying. Although they mention African- and Jewish-Americans in comparison to the Cuban-American community, their remarks on...