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Introduction Soraya M. Castro Mariño and Ronald W. Pruessen It did not take the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution to prompt awareness of the drama and significance inherent in the relationship between Cuba and the United States. Long before 2009, political leaders, scholars, media observers, and many citizens in both countries were fully conscious of the special, sometimes explosive nature of their historic connection. Cold war sparks flashing over decades had steadily illuminated agitated calculations of threat and heated calls for vigilance—from the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis to the conflicts in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, for example. In addition—and significantly—historically more distant experiences gave added resonance to the mutual sensitivities of Cubans and Americans toward each other. After all, more than a century of problematic interaction preceded the triumph of the 1959 revolution, and historians in both countries have long since fleshed out a many-chaptered saga: pre–Monroe Doctrine speculation about the way a “ripe fruit” island might fall into the U.S. lap, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century military occupation that hemmed in Cuba’s drive for genuine independence (using the Platt Amendment as a sword of Damocles), and the interventions that continued to limit Cuban sovereignty across the decades.1 Whether a reminder was needed or not, however, the fiftieth anniversary of the 1959 revolution highlighted the drama inherent in the CubanU .S. saga—and served as a highly appropriate occasion for reviewing its history. The completion of this particular half century provided a valuable opportunity for cool reflection. Among other things, for example, assessment could now be richly informed by both significantly expanded archival evidence and the retrospective insights of many key participants in the fraught encounters that unfolded after the revolution’s initial triumph. 2 · Soraya M. Castro Mariño and Ronald W. Pruessen This volume emerged from one specific effort at review and assessment: a 2007–9 project supported by the Ford Foundation. Prompted by the approaching fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, a team of scholars from the University of Toronto and the University of Havana began organizing a series of workshops, conference panels, and lectures designed to survey Cuban-U.S. relations as they had evolved during particularly tumultuous decades. The collaborative effort was launched at the September 2007 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association (held in Montreal, so as to allow significant Cuban participation). It then continued by way of a panel at the 2008 annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (in Vancouver), a 2008–9 lecture series at the University of Toronto, and a panel within the context of an important May 2009 conference held at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario): “The Measure of a Revolution: Cuba, 1959–2009.” Over the course of the project, the organizers conceptualized an edited volume that would be both traditional and innovative—and the contributors provided the raw materials needed to achieve the desired result. With regard to the United States, we knew it would be hard to resist the temptation to review Cuban-U.S. relations since 1959 by dividing the roughly half-century span into familiar chronological units—and we certainly succumbed to that temptation in part II. We also yielded to the impulse to use the administrations of U.S. presidents as the determinants of historical periods in the relationship, even while Fidel Castro’s name remained a constant touchstone through ten Washington regime changes. The chapters of part II illuminate how various domestic factors, individual actors and groups of actors within each state, and external circumstances time and again sustained the confrontational nature of the U.S.-Cuban relationship. Meanwhile, discussions and contributions made clear the value of complementing chronological divisions with perspectives (and chapters) that would take more wide-ranging and thematic approaches: for example, Cuba’s role as a “revolutionary” force within the international arena; U.S. conceptions of Western Hemisphere and global systems and Cuba’s place within them; the contrast between Cuban-U.S. relations and Cuban-Canadian , Cuban-European, and Cuban-Soviet ties. The value of these perspectives has been emphasized by placing these chapters in part I. On yet another tack—and a subject as complex as Cuban-U.S. relations warrants at least three—we incorporated as part III of this volume the perspectives of a Cuban, an American, and a Mexican scholar who peer imaginatively into the future of Cuba’s relations with...

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