Cranky Neighbors: 150 Years of U.S.-Cuban Relations

January 2, 2009, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution—half a century in which the third world was decolonized; the cold war came to an end; and globalization put health, environment, crime, and terrorism on the transnational agenda. In Latin America, the hegemony of the United States dissipated, fundamentally transforming ties with the hemisphere. Yet relations between Washington and Havana remained frozen in time, hardly changed from the earliest months of Fidel Castro's rule. No other aspect of U.S. diplomacy around the globe was so unaffected by the momentous changes that swept through and transformed the international system. Like Dorian Gray, U.S. policy has stayed unnaturally ageless while all about it changes. What is it about this "infernal island," as Teddy Roosevelt called it, that gives rise to such singular obsession on the part of the United States? The revolution's fiftieth anniversary has brought forth a spate of new books on U.S.-Cuban relations that, either explicitly or implicitly, offer answers to that question.

Daniel Erikson's The Cuba Wars chronicles recent U.S.-Cuban relations, principally of the George W. Bush era. After concisely providing the requisite background, Erikson takes the reader on a guided tour of the topic, stopping at all the important sites. At the Bush White House, the president's instinct for unilateralism and his quasi-religious zeal to spread democracy produced the most unsparingly hostile policy toward Cuba of any of his nine predecessors. As with much of Bush's foreign policy, the strategy toward Havana was based more on faith than on reality. Its underlying premise was that the Cuban regime would crumble when Fidel Castro died, and somehow the tiny dissident movement favored by Washington would be catapulted to power (with a little help from the United States, of course). The orderly succession from Fidel to Raúl Castro in 2006 proved this premise utterly wrong, leaving the Bush administration flum-moxed. As in Iraq, nobody had bothered to devise a plan B.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress held more cards on Cuba than on most foreign policy issues. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996 wrote the U.S. economic embargo into law, thus requiring congressional repeal before the United States and Cuba could resume normal commerce. Fearful that President Bill Clinton might lift the embargo by executive order—the same mechanism that President John F. Kennedy used to impose it—congressional Republicans crafted Helms-Burton to tie the president's hands, usurping control over Cuba policy. That proved to be a formula for paralysis. During George W. Bush's first term, farm-state Republicans and Democrats combined to pass legislation relaxing the ban on travel to Cuba in both the House and Senate, only to see Republican leaders, doing the White House's bidding, scuttle the bills. In Bush's second term, a resurgent campaign finance operation by conservative Cuban Americans broke the congressional majority for relaxing the embargo by funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into the coffers of congressional candidates.

Next stop Miami—by some accounts, the real decision-making center for U.S...