U.S.-Cuban Cooperation Past, Present, and Future (review)

In February 2008, Fidel Castro announced his retirement as the Cuban head of state, citing his ill health. His successor and younger brother, Raúl, became the second leader known to Cuba since the revolution of 1959. Many analysts and commentators have expected Raúl to moderate some of his older brother’s policies and to introduce some limited free-market reforms along the same lines as in China. The younger Castro has even announced in speeches that “socialism means social justice and equality, but equality of rights, of opportunities, not of income” (Latin Business Chronicle, July 21, 2008). In the context of these events, Melanie Ziegler’s book U.S.-Cuban Cooperation seems timely in its examination of how the United States and Cuba have worked together on a host of issues despite the tense public relationship between the two countries.

By looking at post–Cold War U.S.-Cuban cooperation on issues of illegal migration, drug trafficking, the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, and avoidance of accidental war, Ziegler argues that confidence-building measures (CBMs) and quiet diplomacy provide “the best pathway for avoiding future confrontation and for building more normal relations” between the United States and Cuba (xi). She uses the CBM concept from the literature on confidence building by political scientists Michael Krepon, Richard Darilek, Francisco Rojas Aravena, and Joseph Tulchin. These CBMs are meant to increase the level of communication between two antagonistic nations to foster cooperation on mutually beneficial issues and to avoid further conflict. With the end of the Cold War and Soviet support for Castro’s regime, leaders in both Cuba and the United States began to recognize a convergence of interests on various issues once the ideologically polarizing environment of the Cold War did not completely define their relationship. Furthermore, the United States began to explore different CBMs and avenues of cooperation as a way to build a new policy toward Cuba in preparation for the eventuality of Fidel Castro’s passing.

Before discussing her four different case studies of U.S.-Cuban cooperation, Ziegler directly confronts the limits on cooperation resulting from the political influence of the Cuban American exile community. She examines how the exiles initially considered their stay in the United States a temporary condition and worked as foot soldiers taking marching orders from Washington. However, the Cuban American community realized that Castro was not going away and started becoming American citizens to wield political power and shape America’s Cuba policy. With the concentration of Cuban Americans in the perennial presidential swing state of Florida, both Democrats and Republicans have tried to attract their votes by keeping U.S.-Cuban cooperation quiet, espousing anti-Castro rhetoric, and voting for legislation that has attempted to tighten the noose around Cuba following the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Although illegal migration and drug trafficking are issues of paramount importance to the United States in seeking Havana’s cooperation, the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo and the prospect of a U.S. invasion have been the issues most pressing for Cubans searching for Washington’s assistance. Ziegler introduces the categories of high politics and low politics to discuss each of her case studies, and she defines each one as an instance of high politics in which either American or Cuban national security is at stake. She arranges the case studies in order of how systematic and formal the level of cooperation is between the United States and Cuba. During the Cold War years, Cuba and the United States used migration as an ideological weapon of propaganda to tout the power of their economic system. However, the end of the ideological usefulness of migration and the 1994 rafter crisis created conditions for cooperation as U.S. and Cuban representatives met and established an agreement regulating future Cuban migration. Unlike the formal agreement on migration, Ziegler points out that U.S.-Cuban cooperation on drug interdiction has been on a case-by-case basis...