The Long, Stubborn Dialogue between the United States and Cuba

Abstract

William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh’s new book Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana is the culmination of more than a decade worth of research, and it could not have been published at a better moment. Within weeks of its release, President Barack Obama announced that his administration would establish formal diplomatic relations with Cuba and renounce the anachronistic and failed policies of the Cold War. LeoGrande and Kornbluh’s groundbreaking work is essential reading for U.S.-Cuban scholars and for anyone who wants to understand the context of Raúl Castro and Barack Obama’s December 2014 announcements. While most books on U.S.-Cuban relations emphasize the antagonism and active hostility between the two countries, LeoGrande and Kornbluh take the opposite tack. They argue persuasively that “the history of negotiations” deserves its due (p. 5).1 As such, their book provides an in-depth account of the seemingly unending starts and stops of “back channel” diplomacy from the Eisenhower years to the Obama administration. The research is a masterful combination of declassified government documents and over fifty personal interviews with former negotiators on both the U.S. and Cuban teams, including Ricardo Alarcón, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter, and Fidel Castro.2 They demonstrate that through both formal and informal initiatives, the United States and Cuba engaged in almost constant dialogue. The book is also a testament to bureaucratic inertia and the status quo, because despite the countless overtures, secret meetings, and “back channels,” depressingly little progress was made for more than five decades.