ABSTRACT
On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush began his first term. An accidental president of sorts, he won the White House after losing the popular vote. Only two other presidents-Rutherford B. Hayes (1876) and Benjamin Harrison (1888)— had earned that distinction. Though neither Hayes nor Harrison left much of a mark, Bush’s legacy will be long remembered. After September 11, 2001, the president found his calling as a wartime Commander-in-Chief and the American people rewarded him with sky-high approval. Later that month, Al Gore, the Democrat he had defeated in the 2000 election, delivered the keynote address at the Iowa Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines. He shelved the hard-hitting speech he had been preparing and simply said: “George W. Bush is my commander in chief.”1 Across the Atlantic, Europeans seconded Le Monde’s oversized headline that shouted off the page: “We Are All Americans Now!” In the West, most applauded the war in Afghanistan where Al Qaeda had found safe harbor under the Taliban. At home and abroad, however, Bush’s fortunes slowly began to turn with the decision to launch the Iraq War, the occupation’s subsequent mismanagement and the revelations of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. All the same the president won reelection outright, even if his victory margins in Electoral College and popular votes were the tightest since Woodrow Wilson’s reelection in 1916.2 Though down 10 percentage points from 2000, Cuban Americans gave him a hefty 72 percent of their votes. Hardliners in particular hoped Bush would find an Iraqlike resolve to rid the Western Hemisphere of its last dictator. In Havana, Fidel Castro never looked back after Elián González. Castro was an old-fashioned Stalinist, especially regarding the economy. While the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam advanced market reforms in the mid-1980s, the Comandante had reversed the mild market socialism that Cuba had adopted a
decade earlier. In the early 1990s, he had accepted limited market openings, but only because Cuba’s economic collapse amid the demise of its erstwhile patrons had forced him to do it. Even more distasteful to Castro were the debates within the elite that advocated more thorough market reforms and minor political liberalization. The Elián saga gave Castro the opportunity to restore the mobilizational politics that suited him best. Venezuela, moreover, provided Cuba with an economic backing that relieved the urgency for further reforms. The Comandante and Chávez shared an aversion to markets and a worldview against U.S. imperialism that other populist leaders would soon brandish in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Honduras under Manuel Zelaya. Still, Castro failed to take full advantage of Bush’s mounting unpopularity. In 2003, he unleashed a Black Spring of fury against peaceful opponents on the island that earned him widespread international rebuke. Well before becoming a presidential candidate, Bush had strongly backed the embargo. Cuban Miami, moreover, had been an important player in the postelection drama that eventually led to his presidency. All the same, not until 2003 would the White House move to stiffen U.S. policy to the satisfaction of hardliners in Washington and Miami. During Bush’s first two years, the United States and Cuba stayed on the tracks the Clinton administration had laid down in 1999-2000. By July 2006, however, when Fidel Castro fell ill and seemed on his deathbed, the United States and Cuba were communicating mostly through public recriminations. In January 2004, the Bush administration had suspended the migration talks that had been held every six months since 1995.
