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William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 524 pp. $25.00.

2016; The MIT Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jcws_r_00686

1531-3298

Felipe Pereira Loureiro,

Cuban History and Society

In April 1963 the Cuban leader Fidel Castro bluntly asked James Donovan, the U.S. representative of the Cuban Families Committee for the Prisoners of War (CFC), responsible for negotiating the release of prisoners of the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion on the south coast of Cuba, “if any relations were to commence between the U.S. and Cuba, how it would come about?” An expert Cold War negotiator, Donovan replied by questioning whether Castro knew how porcupines make love. Castro said he did not know, and Donovan explained, “well, the answer is ‘very carefully’, and that's how you and the U.S. would have to get into this” (pp. 66, 67).Probably neither Donovan nor Castro imagined back in 1963 that caution would not be sufficient to bring about normalization in relations between the United States and Cuba. Fifty-five years would pass before diplomatic relations were restored and the trade embargo imposed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960 was partly lifted. The extent to which the measures taken by the Obama administration toward Cuba starting in December 2014 will stand the scrutiny of the U.S. Congress and the intentions of the next U.S. president remains to be seen. But William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh make clear, in their exceptional Back Channel to Cuba, that the path to normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations is not necessarily irreversible.Drawing on ten years of research, LeoGrande and Kornbluh marshal an extraordinary amount of primary sources, most of them confidential materials obtained from U.S. archives and first made public through their work. The authors also carried out dozens of interviews with Cuban and, particularly, U.S. officials responsible for back-channel initiatives between Havana and Washington from the early days of the Cuban revolution to the present. If Lars Schoultz's That Infernal Little Cuban Republic shows that U.S. administrations since Eisenhower attempted to topple Castro, or at least to destabilize the Cuban regime, LeoGrande and Kornbluh present multiple and convincing evidence that Washington has repeatedly attempted, to different degrees, to negotiate with Havana on pressing themes and issues of common interest, such as migration, drug trafficking, maritime boundaries, and anti-hijacking schemes. Washington also reached out to Havana to discuss broader topics, including the release of political prisoners and a path for normalization of bilateral relations.Besides Cuban and U.S. officials, unusual personalities were called on to carry out back-channel discussions, including ABC News journalist Lisa Howard, Coca-Cola executive J. Paul Austin, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, French journalist Jean Daniel, and even the owner of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, Peter Angelos. Many of these discussions led to important agreements, such as the one carried out by Donovan during John F. Kennedy's administration, which allowed the release of 1,113 Bay of Pigs prisoners along with 39 U.S. citizens, in exchange for U.S. food and medicine and the release of Cubans held in the United States. Some agreements did not last long, such as the migration accords negotiated during Ronald Reagan's administration in 1985, which endured only four months before being overruled by new quarrels (specifically, the U.S. government's support for the anti-Castro Radio Martí), or by changes in the Cuban and U.S. domestic political milieu. The authors compellingly show that a major impediment to the normalization of bilateral relations was Washington's staunch resistance to treating Cuba as an independent and equal country. Besides, Washington frequently changed its requirements for lifting the U.S. trade embargo, making it hard for Cuba to compromise. During the Cold War, the U.S. determined that the end of Cuba's support for other Communist regimes (such as Angola and Nicaragua) was a sine qua non for reviewing the embargo. However, when Havana did collaborate in bringing peace to the decades-long conflict in Southwest Africa, the administration of George H. W. Bush did not stick by what had been negotiated by Reagan's team and asked for further compromises. In the post–Cold War period, Washington also wanted Cuba to change its domestic regime, allowing for a liberal democracy to be fully in place before any changes to the trade embargo could be considered. This new U.S. approach not only failed to mollify Cuba, but also, as LeoGrande and Kornbluh argue, made things worse. Surprisingly, U.S.-Cuban relations were less acrimonious during several periods of the Cold War than after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even though the book was published before Obama's initiatives in December 2014, which marked a turning point in U.S. policy toward Cuba, the basic finding still holds. Partial reconciliation became feasible only when U.S. officials no longer linked domestic change in Cuba to normalization of diplomatic relations.The authors’ excellent research, however, seems unable to overcome problems related to the unilateralism of the sources employed. Although Cuban archives remain closed to researchers, the authors could have triangulated U.S. sources with official documents of the countries engaged in back-channel initiatives, such as Carlos Salinas de Gotari's Mexico and José Rodríguez Zapatero's Spain, for example, in order to build a more nuanced account of events. When this was not possible, readers should have been constantly reminded that interpretations were based on U.S. confidential sources and interviews only, and on U.S. officials’ memoirs in some cases, making the analysis of the Cuban side of the story fragile. Second, the book's chronological organization, from the Eisenhower administration to the present, makes it repetitive and does not help readers grasp the evolution of agreements that encroached on several presidencies. An introductory account of how U.S.-Cuban relations evolved over time followed by thematic chapters would have better suited the purposes of the book. Finally, the authors at times focus excessively on U.S.-Cuban affairs, leaving other fundamental issues unexplored. This is the case, for instance, when they briefly discuss the pressure brought on Latin American countries to reestablish economic relations with Cuba in the mid-1970s, or the opposition of several countries to the legalization of the trade embargo through the U.S. Congress's Helms-Burton Act of 1996, bringing the case before international forums such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. A more detailed account of these events could have provided thoughtful perspectives on the incentives for Washington to put hard-liners on hold and to negotiate with Cuba.Nevertheless, none of these setbacks fundamentally compromises the great contribution LeoGrande and Kornbluh's make to the topic. Their work is a fundamental source for those engaged in understanding U.S.-Cuban relations after the 1959 revolution and why normalization has been delayed, despite president Obama's important steps. The book will be of great interest to policymakers seeking to gain historical perspective on the subject and to understand that one cannot declare victory too soon when it comes to the normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations, notwithstanding the impressive progress made recently. A long path may still lie ahead.