Constructing US Foreign Policy: The Curious Case of Cuba by David Bernell

Author:David Bernell [Bernell, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: International Relations, Military, Political Science, History, General
ISBN: 9781136814112
Google: TvCsAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-03-12T07:42:58+00:00

The Dual Challenge to the United States

This characterization of Cuba as it existed to those in the Reagan administration serves to furnish a set of attitudes, prejudices, representations and constructions of respective US and Cuban identities as they have been predominantly understood in the United States in the context of the Cold War and anti-communism. The representations of Cuba as a communist nation form the second of the two domains in which Cuba has existed as an object of American foreign policy. Since Castro came to power, the island has occupied a particular conceptual space with regard to two overarching themes: US dominance in Latin America and Cold War anti-communism. While these two sites of political contestation have been represented here as different spheres of American foreign policy, they have been by no means mutually exclusive. Rather, since the end of World War II, they have often converged to produce an especially sharp US reaction in places such as Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada and especially Cuba.

Communism in a Latin American country, or at least the perception of it, was seen to present a problem of special significance for the US. Regardless of the fact that this was an age of nuclear missiles, in which there was the possibility of immediate, assured destruction regardless of a missile’s origin, the establishment of a communist government in the Western Hemisphere, an ideological soulmate to the greatest American adversary in history, was something considered to be far less tolerable than a communist government in other parts of the world. Even if nuclear annihilation could be avoided, the neighborhood would still be threatened. A more traditional idea of security, that which emphasizes proximity and the possibilities for harm based on that proximity, held sway throughout the Cold War with regard to Latin America. Compounding security concerns were America’s ideological leanings. Anti-communism easily maintained its strength as long as there were communists to confront. Also, by the post-war era Monroe’s Doctrine of a common Western Hemisphere was historically enshrined as virtually immutable, even if great transformations in global politics had rendered it unusable as a working policy. There was little during the Cold War to challenge the special status of Latin America in the eyes of US policymakers.

While the anti-communist inclination was the most prevalent feature of American foreign policy since World War II, America’s Cold War and imperialist outlooks simultaneously contained and subsumed one another. Each could be made to fit comfortably within the framework of the other. When they combined for the first time in Guatemala, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles objected to a “Communist-type reign of terror,” but especially to one “on this continent.”82 Kennedy pointed to the problems in Cuba in which “Communist agents seeking to exploit that region’s peaceful revolution of hope have established a base on Cuba,” and made clear that “Communist domination in this hemisphere can never be negotiated.”83 Ronald Reagan was especially adamant about the spread of communism in the region,

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