Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana by William M. LeoGrande & Peter Kornbluh

Author:William M. LeoGrande & Peter Kornbluh [LeoGrande, William M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2014-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Cuba, Alone

Every president since Eisenhower had castigated Fidel Castro for presiding over a dictatorship, but none before Bush had demanded, as a condition of better relations, that Cuba undergo regime change. The issues on Washington’s agenda had always emphasized Cuban foreign policy—Havana’s support for revolution in Latin America and its expeditionary forces in Africa, as well as its strategic relationship with the Soviet Union. In early 1989, these were still the issues that Secretary Baker emphasized when he cabled U.S. diplomatic posts to deny rumors that Bush would improve relations with Cuba. By late 1989, however, Cuban troops had come home from Africa, Havana was normalizing relations with its Latin neighbors, and the Soviet Union was abandoning its strategic commitments abroad. The foreign policy issues had been rendered moot.

Yet better relations were still not in the cards. For Washington, the new international balance of forces revived the dream of rolling back the revolution. After the failure of the CIA’s covert operations to unseat Fidel in the 1960s, regime change in Cuba was not a practical possibility. But as the collapse of European communism sent the Cuban economy reeling, that calculus changed, and Washington’s demands changed with it. The United States, Bush declared, would normalize relations only if Cuba abandoned socialism and adopted multiparty electoral democracy. On May 20, 1991, Cuban Independence Day, Bush spelled out what he expected: “Our goals for the Cuban nation, shared by Cubans everywhere, are plain and clear: freedom and democracy, Mr. Castro, not sometime, not someday, but now. If Cuba holds fully free and fair elections under international supervision, respects human rights, and stops subverting its neighbors, we can expect relations between our two countries to improve significantly.”178 In short, Cuba could have normal relations with the United States only if it capitulated.

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