ABSTRACT

When the dominoes fell in Eastern Europe in 1989 and Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union tottered, the United States again envisioned the downfall of Fidel Castro. The Cuban American National Foundation lobbied Congress and the White House intensely to step up pressure on Havana. The time had finally arrived for a post-Castro Cuba. CANF and many in Congress favored the enactment of legislation that would tighten the embargo. President George H.W. Bush, however, balked at yielding to Congress any of the powers that the Constitution grants the executive to conduct foreign policy. Still, after candidate William J. Clinton supported the Cuban Democracy Act (CDA), the White House did as well. In October 1992, Bush signed the CDA into law. CANF ’s donations to political candidates across the partisan aisle and the fact that Cuban Americans lived mostly in Florida and New Jersey, two states rich in Electoral College votes, were also important factors in the CDA’s passage. Though realpolitik was guiding U.S. relations with China and Vietnam, Washington followed a different approach with the island: Once again, it began to pursue regime change in Havana. The key source of tensions in the U.S.–Cuba relationship-the dynamics between a great power and its weaker neighborlived on after the Cold War. Geography again dealt Cuba a difficult hand. Beginning in the late 1970s, military dictatorships fell and civil wars ended in Latin America. In Nicaragua, for example, the Sandinistas lost the election of 1990 to Doña Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. In Chile, Don Patricio Aylwin led the center-left Concertación to the first of four electoral victories between 1989 and 2009. While the Christian Democratic Party was its largest member, the coalition also included the Socialist Party and two smaller ones that had supported Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970-1973). In El Salvador, ARENA-the conservative

Nationalist Republican Alliance-had emerged as the dominant political force in 1989. After the 1992 peace accords, however, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) became a legal political party and the country’s second political force. In short, Cuba’s friends were now competing in free and fair elections. By the early 1990s and for the first time ever, all the governments in Latin America, except for Cuba, were democracies. Great expectations abounded, including that a transition in Cuba would promptly follow suit. No doubt Cuba was the odd country out in the Western Hemisphere. With Soviet and European Communism in the dustbin, U.S. allies in Europe and the Western Hemisphere advocated engagement with Havana. If in 1962 Kennedy had worried that the U.S. fixation with Cuba would hamper European understanding of its actions during the Missile Crisis, thirty years later the world was more mystified than ever at the U.S. position. Be that as it may, neither the isolation that Washington practiced nor the openness that U.S. allies preferred brought about significant change in Cuba. Had the United States, Europe, Canada and Latin America joined forces on either confrontation or engagement, the outcome might have been different. But Cuba did not elicit the international outrage that apartheid South Africa or Augusto Pinochet’s Chile had. Common ground was possible only on engagement, which the United States resisted. By the time President Clinton signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (also known as the Helms-Burton Act) into law, Havana had served the United States and the international community with the fait accompli of its survival.