ABSTRACT
The Council on Foreign Relations is a strange and wondrous arena for policy-making. Heading the group advocating normalization with Cuba are two distinguished public servants: Bernard Aronson, who served as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs between 1989 and 1993 in the Bush administration, and William Rogers, secretary of state from 1969-1973 in the Nixon administration. Given the substantial dubiousness of the document's metaphysical domain assumptions, the four "baskets" of recommendations that follow can best be seen as a wish list developed in Washington, D.C. with little or no regard to actual current events in Cuba. Couched as they are in humanitarian language, these proposals would allow island-resident Cubans to be claimed as dependents for US income tax purposes, and permit Cubans to visit the United States to take unimpeded advantage of the opportunity of seeing their relatives. Beyond the absence of any requirement of reciprocity is a leap of faith.
