Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War by Hideaki Kami

Abstract

Reviewed by: Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War by Hideaki Kami Patrick Iber Hideaki Kami, Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. In recent years, some of the most innovative work in the history of Latin American international relations has moved away from analysis of bipolar relationships between Washington and other actors, and toward a multipolar consideration of the exercise of power. Tanya Harmer's Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, for example, argues forcefully for the importance of Brazil's foreign policy in the Chilean transition from socialism to military dictatorship. Renata Keller's Mexico's Cold War considers the covert and overt aspects of the triangular relationship of Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. Hideaki Kami's Diplomacy Meets Migration takes a similar approach, but with something of a twist: the third player in his analysis (to go along with the United States and Cuba) is not another country, but Miami. It is a decision that makes a good deal of sense. As Kami puts it, "Because Cuban emigres in Miami intervened in international politics at critical moments, relations between Washington and Havana also intermingled with the political dynamics of the Cuban-American community" (5). After the Cuban Revolution, Miami became the center of many a counterrevolutionary effort, some aided by the Central Intelligence Agency, others independent of it. Who Miami's Cubans were, what they did, and who might join them were matters of ongoing dispute. And of course, there was (and is) the importance of Miami's Cubans to Republican politics in a crucial state. [End Page 310] The book begins with a chapter on the origins of the Cuban émigré community in Miami in the years after the revolution and proceeds chronologically through to the end of the George H. W. Bush administration, at which point the paper trail ends, presumably on shelves of classified boxes. Kami makes use of a wide range of sources; beyond the US presidential libraries and those located in Miami, he has consulted records from the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and Mexico. Many of his most interesting discoveries come from Cuban diplomatic archives. The analysis here is unlikely to radically revise understandings of Cuban-US relations. Though full of sound judgments and based on prodigious research, parts of the book have a rather familiar feel. Perhaps one of the book's contributions is inherent in its methodology and borne out by its findings, which show all of the ways in which Cuban Miami was not identical to Washington in its interests or its actions. Émigrés were not puppets; they were frequently frustrating to various administrations in Washington. But nor were they, as US diplomat George Kennan wrote in 1977, a lobby capable of "bending us to their purposes." Consider, for example, the case of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), founded in 1981 by Jorge Mas Canosa. Mas Canosa was able to bring Reagan to Miami in 1983 and help lobby for the creation of Radio Martí, and later for the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992. In the 1980s, CANF acted both like a lobby and like a government-in-exile, drawing up plans for a postcommunist Cuba with the assistance of right-wing free-market economists like Arthur Laffer and Manuel Ayau. But even with these ideological points of contact and the background of shared anticommunism, CANF and Reagan were sometimes at odds, especially over issues of migration. The Mariel boatlift had drawn much negative attention in the United States to the issue of Cuban migration. (A 1982 poll showed that Cubans, remarkably, were the least welcome migrants in US history, and popular culture in the 1980s, from Scarface to Miami Vice frequently associated Cubans with criminality.) Kami shows remarkable evidence of harebrained schemes the Reagan administration considered, but never carried out, to dump Cubans deemed criminal or insane back on the island. CANF, by contrast, deemed resistance to migration a betrayal of the cause of freedom. All in all, Kami portrays the triangular dynamic generated by Washington-Havana-Miami as a kind of a trap. Miami's Cubans, at least...