ABSTRACT
The US economic embargo against Cuba has been in place for thirty-six years. During that period, its rationale and goals have changed. Washington's post-Cold War policy toward Cuba has been caught up in a larger debate concerning the effectiveness of economic sanctions in general and of unilateral sanctions in particular as a way of producing change in the nature and behavior of hostile regimes. The power of the Cuban American lobby on the Cuba sanctions issue reflects the more general phenomenon of the increased clout of domestic actors in shaping foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. The economic embargo, which dates from 1962, was the culmination of unilateral US responses to a series of developments in Cuba during the height of the Cold War, developments that the John F. Kennedy administration interpreted as having put Castro's Cuba squarely in the Soviet camp.
