From Havana to Miami: U.S. Cuba Policy as a Two-Level Game

Abstract

or thirty years, Cuba was a focal point of the Cold War. Before the demise of the Soviet Union, Cuba's close ideological and military partnership with the communist superpower posed a challenge to U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Third World (see, e.g., Dominguez 1989). With the end of the Cold War, Cuba retrenched, ending its aid programs for foreign revolutionaries and regimes. Without the Soviet Union's sponsorship, Cuba could no longer afford the luxury of a global foreign policy exporting revolution. Instead, its diplomats focused on reorienting Cuba's international economic relations toward Latin America and Europe, building friendly relations with former adversaries. Ordinarily, such a massive shift in the international system would be expected to produce a significant change in U.S. policy, as it did in the cases of Russia, Eastern Europe, Angola, and even Vietnam. But U.S. policy toward Cuba changed hardly at all. That is an anomaly we endeavor to explain herein, using Robert D. Putnam's (1988) theory or metaphor of international bargaining as a two-level game. (For elaborations on Putnam's model, see Evans et al. 1993). The two-level game model also provides a coherent explanation of President Bill Clinton's handling of the 1994 Cuban refugee crisis and the 1996 shootdown of two small planes by Cuban fighters. Putnam argues that in any international bargaining situation, national leaders are actually involved in two negotiations simultaneously: the international negotiation (level 1), wherein the leader seeks to reach agreement with other international actors; and a domestic negotiation (level 2), in which the national leader must persuade his domestic constituency to accept (ratify) the level 1 agreement. For leaders, the problem is that rational moves in the level 1 game may prove impolitic at level 2, or vice versa. The set of all possible agreements that domestic constituents will ratify is called the level 2 win-set. To achieve a successful agreement, the leader must locate the intersection, if any, between his constituency's winset and what the other level 1 negotiators will accept (that is, the level 1 win-set). The negotiation is complex because each negotiator is playing a similar two-level game. Putnam's contribution lies in his emphasis on the interactive nature of the international and domestic processes.l