That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution. By Lars Schoultz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 745 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3260-8.)

Abstract

This is a monumental study of U.S.-Cuba relations (with 567 pages of text and 157 pages of notes) based on an extensive use of primary sources. It will undoubtedly become an indispensable tool for anyone interested in this topic. It starts with John Quincy Adams's 1823 prediction that Cuba will gravitate, “like an apple severed … from its native tree,” toward the North American Union and ends with the obsessive hostility of the George W. Bush administration toward the Cuban regime. But the heart of the book is a detailed record of how every U.S. administration since Dwight D. Eisenhower's has dealt with Cuba, including Washington, D.C.'s every move to support the Fulgencio Batista regime in the 1950s and every violent plan it initiated, including state-sponsored terrorism, to overthrow Fidel Castro's government. The details the book provides of the high period of U.S. armed hostility that started in 1960 and ended with the dismantling of the Central Intelligence Agency Miami station in early 1965 are very useful. So too is its lengthy discussion of the Jimmy Carter years, a period that witnessed the most extensive effort undertaken by any American administration to normalize U.S.-Cuban relations. Although some of the diplomatic initiatives adopted then have endured to this day, such as the establishment of interest sections in Washington, D.C., and Havana, the goal to normalize relations failed. Lars Schoultz describes several factors as having contributed to this failure, such as the strategic conflicts between the soft and hard lines of Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the Cuban intervention in Africa. American hostility stiffened in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the rise to power of the Cuban American right in south Florida. The accommodation of this lobby by Democratic president Bill Clinton was a factor leading to the enactment of the Helms-Burton Act (1996), which will hinder future attempts to rescind the fifty-year-old economic attack on Cuba. Throughout his policy discussion Schoultz provides invaluable information on matters such as food exports, travel to Cuba, and immigration from the island.