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14 The George H. W. Bush–Clinton– Castro Years From the Cold War to the Colder War (1989–2001) Jorge I. Domínguez Hundreds of thousands of Cuban troops deployed to nearly every corner of the globe—that seemed to be the nightmare of every U.S. administration from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s. From its own perspective, President Fidel Castro’s government attempted to use its activist foreign policy first to protect itself from hostile U.S. policies, and second to leverage support from the Soviet Union and other communist countries for Cuba’s own domestic development. The first proposition had been articulated by Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the 1960s when he called on revolutionaries to create “two, three Vietnams” in order to confront and weaken the United States and its allies. Even as the Cuban government gradually edged away from ample support for many revolutionary insurgencies, the strategy of global engagement as the best defense against U.S. offense persisted. The second proposition developed in the 1970s. Although Cuba’s decisions to deploy troops or to undertake other internationalist missions were characteristically its own, it also furthered a long-term tendency to coordinate such policies with those of the Soviet Union, demonstrating thereby that Cuba was the Soviet Union’s most reliable foreign policy ally in the cold war, and providing a basis for a substantial claim on Soviet resources.1 Indeed, Cuba was the only communist country able to deploy its armed forces thousands of miles from its borders to participate in wars that were, at best, only remotely related to the defense of the homeland. Those troops fighting on the savannahs of Angola or the steppes of Ethiopia were not Czechs, Poles, Mongols, or Bulgarians; they were Cubans. And unlike the 280 · Jorge I. Domínguez U.S. armed forces in Vietnam and the Soviet armed forces in Afghanistan, Cubans won the three wars they fought on African soil: Angola 1975–76, Ethiopia 1977–78, and Angola 1987–88. Cuba’s military effort was impressive even when compared to the U.S. military effort during the Vietnam War. From 1975 through 1989, Cuba kept more troops deployed to African countries each year than the United States had stationed in Vietnam during the peak year of the war (1968), relative to the respective populations of Cuba and the United States. The Soviet Union, in turn, provided massive economic, military, and political support for Cuba, especially from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Such assistance enabled the Cuban economy to recover from its collapse at the end of the 1960s and funded the growth of a social welfare state that substantially increased Cubans’ quality of life, notably by standards of education and health. In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and no Soviet successor state provided assistance to President Fidel Castro’s government. Cuba’s economy shrank dramatically in the early years of the 1990s; it stabilized at a low level only in 1996. And Che’s old slogan sounded ironic in the 1990s, because Vietnam itself rushed headlong toward a market economy. Given Cuba’s diminishing power, how can we make sense of the overall pattern of U.S.-Cuban relations in the 1990s following the end of the cold war in Europe? Why was it that the U.S. government established workable relations with every remaining communist government but Cuba? Even some of the most problematic of those governments have received greater deference from the United States than has Cuba’s. The United States engaged Serbia’s government respectfully, for example, in order to reach the 1996 Dayton, Ohio, accords that ended the civil war in Bosnia. And the United States has been prepared to provide various forms of assistance to North Korea in exchange for that country’s commitment to forgo the development of nuclear weapons. This chapter explores four scholarly explanations for the U.S. position. First, the distribution of power in the international system, as it changed with the end of the cold war in Europe, is a major explanation for both the dramatic redesign and curtailment of Cuban foreign policy and the repositioning of U.S. policy toward Cuba. It fails to explain, however, the intense U.S. preoccupation with prescribing the details of Cuba’s future domestic politics. A second explanation comes from exploring ideological themes of long standing in both U.S. and Cuban policies. There is a close correspondence [3.141.31.240...

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