Who knows what will happen in the coming decade…
BOOK REVIEW
Daniel P. Erickson: The Cuba Wars. Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution
Reviewed by Max J. Castro
This book presents a dispassionate and thorough description of recent U.S.-Cuba relations and of the domestic dynamics driving U.S. policy.
The primary research for the book consists of four dozen interviews with individuals ranging from the Reverend Lucius Walker to Otto Reich. Significantly, only two of the interviews were conducted with individuals based in Cuba (including an email exchange with a U.S. correspondent on the island.) Moreover, except for the economist Pedro Monreal, none of the interviews are with Cubans who maintain a non-adversarial relationship with the Cuban government. Nor are there any interviews with Cuban-Americans who oppose U.S. policy toward Cuba with the exception of a phone interview with Sergeant Carlos Lazo, a fierce opponent of the U.S. travel ban. This book contains no interviews with Cuban officials and only one with a dissident, the Catholic intellectual Dagoberto Valdés.
Thus this book is mostly about the rhetorical and political wars over Cuba in Washington and to a lesser extent Miami. Remarkably, although the interviews are heavily weighted toward the staunchly anti-Castro side of the spectrum, the book comes across as fair and evenhanded.
What is missing, however, is the historical context which underlies the Havana-Washington dispute, the kind of deep analysis that one gets, for instance, in the writings of the historian Louis Pérez Jr. Also missing is a sense of what the political scientist Damián Fernández has called “the politics of passion.”
Erickson, who is a senior associate at the Inter-American Dialogue, a DC think tank, does an excellent job of describing the role of the new hard-line players in the Cuba wars, including South Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wassermen Schultz and Washington lobbyist Mauricio Claver-Carone, who have come into the battle to relieve the waning old guard.
What about the “next revolution” referenced in the title? One gets the sense that the author has no idea what will happen in Cuba over the next 5-10 years. To be fair, no one else does either. Erickson writes that “it remains an open question whether Raúl Castro and Barack Obama will be able to heal the tormented relationship between their countries.” Erickson puts his bet on generational change on both sides. He closes by commenting on a remark by Fidel Castro which seems to imply that Castro does not expect to live until the end of the Obama administration. Erickson writes that “If the Cuban leader’s prophesy finally comes to pass, then the world will find out whether the Cuban communist regime and the U.S. embargo are truly built to last.”
Thus it would seem that despite his illness and his retirement from leadership posts, Cuba’s fate is still tied to the person of Fidel Castro. Haven’t the last few years shown the fallacy of such thinking? One would rather say that the fate of Cuba rests on whether the United States can come to terms with dealing with Cuba as a “normal” communist country, say China or Vietnam, or whether it insists on an overt policy of regime change.
Those caveats aside, this is still a very good and up-to-date reference book for the lay reader and for students wishing to understand the never-ending U.S.-Cuba feud.
