Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by Hideaki Kami examining how U.S. officials in the late 1970s tried unsuccessfully to normalize relations with Cuba after nearly two decades of intense hostility. The overtures were spurred in part by early indications that the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro might be interested in a dialogue. U.S. officials sensed that they would need to involve Cuban-Americans in any opening, not only because the émigré community would be uneasy about any seeming warming toward the Cuban regime but also because some important issues in the dialogue pertained directly to Cuban-Americans, including questions of migration, family contacts, human rights in Cuba, and armed anti-Castro operations launched by émigrés. Ultimately, the dialogue made little headway and was derailed by Cuba's stepped-up military intervention in Africa in support of Soviet-backed regimes and insurgents and by Castro's refusal to show greater respect for human rights in Cuba. Nevertheless, the emergence of a triangular Washington-Havana-Miami relationship, linking the U.S. government, the Cuban Communist regime, and the Cuban-American community, marked an important departure in U.S.-Cuban relations.

The next article, by Andrea Graziosi, offers a comparative analysis of the internal and external dimensions of the disastrous famines that resulted from the policies adopted by Iosif Stalin in the USSR in the 1930s and by Mao Zedong in the People's Republic of China in the 1950s. These famines, stemming from brutal campaigns launched without regard for the catastrophic human toll, reflected the nature of Stalinism and Maoism. Graziosi explores the similarities and differences between the two famines and discusses how the approach taken by Mao was heavily influenced by Stalin's earlier approach, a case of the pernicious importation of appalling ideas.

The next article, by Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, recounts how the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) experienced severe internal tensions in 1973–1974 as a result of actions taken by President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, before, during, and after the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Kissinger's unilateral proclamation of a "Year of Europe" in April 1973 had gotten things off to a rocky start, and disarray escalated after the October 1973 war broke out. Kissinger pressed NATO officials and member governments to back the U.S. stance on the war, a move that antagonized many West European leaders, who saw it as a heavy-handed attempt to extend the alliance's jurisdiction beyond the North Atlantic area. The friction increased when the United States abruptly announced that it was placing its global military forces on a higher, DEFCON III, alert, a step taken without any consultation with (or even notification to) NATO allies. Turmoil within the alliance was so intense that sustained diplomacy was needed to prevent a perilous downward spiral. NATO's adoption of the Atlantic Declaration in June 1974 partly alleviated the tension but left an uneasy residue, which failed to dissipate during Kissinger's remaining two-and-a-half years in office under Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

The next article, by Anton Fedyashin, focuses on Humphrey Slater's 1947 novel, The Conspirator, presenting it as the first in the hallowed genre of Cold War spy novels. Slater had been an ardent Stalinist in the 1930s until he went with many of his fellow Communists to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In Spain he gradually became disillusioned with Stalinism, and in 1941 he was expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain. His novel constituted a warning about the dangers of Stalinism and the intrigues the Soviet Union was pursuing to undermine the West—a literary version of essentially the same message conveyed a year later by prominent writers whose essays about the evils of Stalinism were published collectively in the much-celebrated The God That Failed. Slater's Conspirator, based largely on his own experiences, depicted a cunning Soviet spy who had attained a highly sensitive post in the British Foreign Office from which he could furtively abet Stalin's designs—a depiction that was eerily prescient about Donald Maclean, who was not exposed as a Soviet spy until...