ABSTRACT
Cuba and the United States were already, in some respects, exemplary neighbors before Presidents Raul Castro and Barack Obama announced on December 17, 2014, their intention to re-establish formal diplomatic relations and implement other constructive changes in their bilateral relationship. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in Europe, the international system changed dramatically, also reshaping US-Cuban bilateral relations more than the authors of US-Cuban Relations in the 1990s imagined. The Cuban government opened the bilateral strategic window in the fall of 2001, although the unfolding events had been unexpected by both governments. That same fall, the Cuban government outmaneuvered the George W. Bush administration in negotiations over economic relations. The father, in Cuba, claimed the boy, to which he was entitled under the laws of Cuba and the United States, as both President Fidel Castro and President William Clinton agreed.
