Canada, the United States, and Cuba: An Evolving Relationship (review)

In the 1990s Canada pursued a high profile policy toward Cuba, one substantially different from U.S. policy. Liberal Party Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's government called it "constructive engagement." It sustained diplomatic relations, fostered trade, investment, and other economic relations, featured humanitarian and development assistance, and sought gently to nudge Cuba to reform its economy, open its politics, and respect human rights.

Hal Klepak's "Cuba's New Security Agenda: Much New, Much Old" provides a synthetic history from the 1960s to the 1990s of the Cuban government's international and domestic security policies with special attention to the Cuban military. Klepak perceptively notes that Cuba and the United States in the 1990s built a "confidence building security regime" (p. 17) regarding bilateral migration, drug traffic interdiction, and the U.S. base at Guantánamo to contain many sharp edges between the two governments.

In "Canada, Cuba, and Constructive Engagement: Political Dissidents and Human Rights," Sahadeo Basteo and Ian Hesketh explain Canadian policy turns in the 1990s as a function of Canada's domestic politics. The Liberal Party government first employed its Cuban policy to rally support; later, the Reform Party opposition criticized the government until its policy toward Cuba changed. The authors argue that Chrétien boxed himself into making a mistake with his Cuban policy in 1998-1999, raising expectations that Canada could change that country's human rights practices, and retreating from constructive engagement once the Cuban government did not accommodate his wishes.

Peter McKenna, John M. Kirk, and Christine Climenhage's "Canada-Cuba Relations: 'Northern Ice' or Nada Nuevo?" emphasizes the symbolic utility of the "Cuba card" in Canadian domestic politics and the salience of Canada's economic relations with Cuba. They argue that the economic factors are likely to underpin Canadian-Cuban relations even if bilateral political relations remain volatile. The chapter, "Cuba-United States Relations in the Post-Cold War Transition" by Stephen J. Randall narrates these bilateral relations from 1980 to 2000.

Daniel Fisk's "Cuba in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Emergence of a 'Post-Helms-Burton' Era" explains the domestic politics of U.S. policy toward Cuba, especially changes in the U.S. Congress. Fisk notes the mobilization of business, especially agribusiness, lobbies to change U.S. economic sanctions policy, employing Cuba policy as a wedge. This lobbying intensified after Pope John Paul II's January 1998 trip to the island. Divisions between Cuban-Americans, and the Cuban-American National Foundation's weaker clout after its founder's death, facilitated change. "The shift in Congress, then, appears to be based on its changing perceptions of domestic constituencies and their relative power and priorities as much as, if not more than, on specific conclusions about the prospects for reform under Castro" (p. 104).

Karl B. Koth's "Cuba: The 'Nerve-Racking Silence' of Liminality" assesses economics and politics in Cuba and concludes that a "fresh approach is nowhere in sight" (p. 123). He concludes that Chrétien's policies and visit to Cuba had little effect because the main drivers impacting Cuban affairs are within Cuba. Heather N. Nicol's "(Re)Imagining Cuba in a Global World: The Changing Geopolitical Discourse of Canada-Cuba and United States-Cuba Relations after Helms-Burton" assesses Canadian and U.S. discourses and argues that they converged after the Pope's visit to Cuba. Responding in part to the Pope's call that the world should open itself to Cuba, the U.S. government allowed tens of thousands of its citizens to visit the island and eventually authorized food sales. At the same time, Canada took sharper note of the Cuban government's ongoing human rights violations and distanced itself more from Cuba.

This book would have been better had it assessed Cuba-related trends independent of Canadian or U.S. policy...