ABSTRACT
The Cold War, it is often said, has not ended for the United States and Cuba. Yet a key source of tension between the United States and Cuba-the dynamics between a great power and its weaker neighbor-antedates the U.S.–U.S.S.R. conflict. Pursuing what it saw as its Manifest Destiny during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States never considered the rightful interests of neighbors like Cuba.1 Indeed, “what was good for the United States was good for Cuba” could have been the motto stamped on the U.S. calling card. For its part, Cuba viewed the United States with ambivalence: admiration for U.S. democracy and progress, mistrust of U.S. presumptuousness. The island, moreover, had an uncommon expectation of equality that Washington rarely considered. As a result, the United States and Cuba have never had normal ties. In the years before Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the two countries had failed to establish a stable, mutually beneficial relationship as Mexico and the United States had done after 1940. When the revolution aligned Cuba with the former Soviet Union, U.S.–Cuba relations grievously deteriorated. More than two decades after the fall of Communism in Europe, Washington and Havana are still far from resolving their long-standing predicament: How can the great power learn to take into account Cuban sensibilities as its weaker neighbor turns geographic proximity to the United States into an asset? Because the Cold War so estranged the two countries, normalizing relations years after it ended has not been easy for either party. Nor will it be. Without doubt, Cold War legacies burden the prospect of ending a fifty-year enmity that has served neither country well. But they do precisely because, as the superpowers faced off against each other, Cuba upended Washington’s expectations of loyalty. A brief period of détente in the 1970s opened a door to a U.S.–Cuba rapprochement that
ultimately closed. Had it not, a book about Cuba and the United States after the Cold War would not have been subtitled Intimate Enemies. Cuban domestic affairs have always been at the crux of the U.S.–Cuba relationship. In the nineteenth century, the United States feared that political instability on the island could create opportunities for European powers other than Spain to gain influence over Cuba. Until the 1890s, the United States, in effect, preferred that Cuba remain a Spanish colony. As the United States rose over the Caribbean Basin early in the twentieth century, political stability in Cuba remained imperative to safeguard U.S. investments, national security and access to the Panama Canal. Immediately after World War II, nothing signaled the fact that Cuba would bring the Cold War ninety miles from U.S. shores. That, when it did, the United States sought to undermine the revolution was to be expected. Washington failed as a result of its own mistakes but also because of the character of the revolution. In the early years, a decisive majority of the Cuban people lent the revolutionary government inordinate strength. The confrontational nature of the U.S.–Cuba nexus became one of the pillars in the relationship that Fidel Castro and the revolution forged with ordinary citizens. The call for a patria digna, a homeland of dignity, in short, a Cuba para los cubanos, elicited in response impregnable loyalty from the Cuban people. Millions then established such a strong emotional bond with the revolution that la revolución became a quasi-mystical symbol whose pull is still felt in some sectors of Cuban society. By the 1970s, the United States and socialist Cuba appeared ready to make peace. Given the Cold War, U.S. recognition offered to imprint the government in Havana with a mark of permanence. As it had in the past, however, Washington brought to the table a set of expectations commensurate with its status as a great power. At the same time, the prospect of normalization did not lead Cuba to curtail the activist foreign policy that had so enhanced its international standing. The great power-weaker neighbor conundrum remained intact. The arc of U.S.–Cuba relations after the Cold War does not, therefore, start in the late 1980s. The two countries carry exceptionally heavy historical baggage that the superpower conflict gravely compounded.
