Embargo Against Cuba Research Articles

The Mamboniks by Lex Gillespie

Reviewed by: The Mamboniks by Lex Gillespie Hannah Kosstrin (bio) The Mamboniks, directed by Lex Gillespie, Malecón Films, 2019, https://themamboniks.com/ In the 1950s, the mambo was all the rage in New York City. The Afro-Cuban music form and dance practice attracted participants from across cultural and class strata. Star musicians such as Tito Puente and Celia Cruz performed with big bands in dancehalls, including New York's Palladium Ballroom on 53rd and Broadway. These musicians played to eager, full crowds of people mixing swing dance's virtuosic tricks with polyrhythmic hip swivels while their feet tapped out patterns driven by clave sticks. Mambo drew an intercultural crowd of practitioners, especially American Jews. These "mamboniks" (emphasis on the first syllable), self-described mambo lovers, are the focus of Lex Gillespie's feature-length documentary The Mamboniks. The film traces a handful of these dancers' histories practicing mambo from their time as young people to their current experiences as retirees. By shuttling back and forth between New York, Miami, and Havana, and between the 1950s and the present day, the film gives a sense of the transnational circulation of mambo (and mamboniks) as well as its intersecting diasporic contexts between the Jewish, African American, Italian, and Latinx communities in the United States. Meeting the cast of characters gives a lived sense for the 1950s mambo scene. Spinning between Greenwich Village stoops, Jewish delis, hair salons, Miami/South Beach, Coconut Creek's Gold Coast Ballroom, and Havana's Tropicana nightclub, practitioners recount their 1950s world of mambo by visiting and narrating old haunts. The film gives a sense of mambo's longevity through these mamboniks' embodied histories. The mamboniks' experiences dancing and playing music, then at the Palladium Ballroom and now at the Gold Coast Ballroom, fosters their memories of their own lived histories by using their bodily practices to connect to their past. Gillespie situates the mambo craze within the historical context of the United States' relationship with Cuba in the 1950s. Cuba was a popular postwar Caribbean destination for American tourists before [End Page 313] Fidel Castro's rise to power in 1959. The US embargo on Cuba following the 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion confrontation between the US and Soviet Union severed ties between the United States and Cuba. Cutting this contact stemmed the flow of Cuban material culture into the US. Mamboniks remember the difficulty trying to hear Cuban short-wave radio stations in New York to which they previously tuned. After the embargo, according to dancer and musician Joe Marchese, "The Cuban music just stopped coming here." He recalls driving down to Key West, Florida, tape recorder in hand, to record Cuban radio from there. The combination of the Cuban embargo, the rise of rock and roll, and the 1966 closing of the Palladium Ballroom, the mamboniks explain, greatly decreased the practice of American mambo. Yet, Gillespie also highlights how the intercultural mixing of the Jewish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and African American communities in the Palladium offered a respite from antisemitism and racism outside its walls, alongside the nascent American Civil Rights Movement. This is an important area of inquiry that is ripe for further investigation. The Mamboniks shows how the mambo, in turn, became a deeply embedded postwar Jewish cultural practice in New York. Many of the mamboniks anecdotally draw connections between the rhythms of klezmer and mambo as a way to explain Jewish practitioners' attraction to mambo rhythms in music and dance, but the connection seems broader than that since klezmer and mambo are otherwise musically distinct. The mambo became ubiquitous in New York-based Jewish culture in the 1950s. Mambo bands played weddings and bar mitzvahs, and swing dance nights at the 92nd Street Young Men's/Young Women's Hebrew Association (YM/YWHA) on the Upper East Side turned into mambo nights when Tito Puente entered the scene. Mambo also traveled through Jewish channels between Cuba, Florida, and New York. Jewish families vacationing in Miami Beach luxuriated in Cuban music and dance by way of hotels featuring mambo lessons and dance nights; these vacationers brought their interests back to New York. Significantly, Jewish social life in the Catskills mountains...

US policy of economic sanctions against Cuba in 1990s years

The US economic embargo against Cuba has been in place for fifty years. During that period, its rationale and goals have not changed. As it is stressed in the article, principal purpose of the US sanctions strategy is either to modify the international behavior of Cuba, which Washington regarded as a threat to US strategic interests in the Latin America region, or to eliminate the Cuban political regime entirely. Measured against these goals, the sanctions clearly have failed. Author examines key factors having restricted sanctions’ ability to achieve American proclaimed goals regarding to Cuba. In this context, it is underscored that controversial maintenance of the US embargo against Cuba among US allies directly affected the results of sanctions strategy against Cuba. It is stressed that since the early 1960s, when the United States imposed a trade embargo on Cuba, the centerpiece of U.S. policy toward Cuba has consisted of economic sanctions aimed at isolating the government. The United States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo imposed by the United States on Cuba. An embargo was first imposed by the United States on sale of arms to Cuba on the 14th of March 1958, during the Fulgencio Batista regime. On October 19, 1960 the U.S. placed an embargo on exports to Cuba except for food and medicine after Cuba nationalized American-owned Cuban oil refineries without compensation. On February 7, 1962 the embargo was extended to include almost all imports. Currently, the Cuban embargo is enforced mainly through six statutes: the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, the Cuban Assets Control Regulations of 1963, the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, the Helms–Burton Act 1996, and the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000. The stated purpose of the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 is to maintain sanctions on Cuba so long as the Cuban government refuses to move toward democratization and greater respect for human rights. The article emphasizes that The Helms–Burton Act further restricted United States citizens from doing business in or with Cuba, and mandated restrictions on giving public or private assistance to any successor government in Havana unless and until certain claims against the Cuban government were met.

Nigel D.White, The Cuban Embargo under International Law: El Bloqueo, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015, 208 pp, hb £95.00, pb £34.99.

The focus of Professor White's timely book The Cuban Embargo under International Law: El Bloqueo is the unilaterally imposed US embargo on Cuba. In it he offers a thorough analysis of El Bloqueo and its effects, and the resulting compatibility or otherwise with international law. However, as the author makes clear, this is less a study of the embargo in its own terms than a broad analysis of what the embargo reveals about international law. Although illuminating, it is not always a pretty story. The book highlights how international law operated to enable and facilitate a problematic sanctions programme. In its consideration of substantive rules (notably regarding use of force, sovereignty, self-determination, human rights, trade and investment) the book also reveals the pointlessness and obscuring effects of fragmented or compartmentalised international law: for example certain legal rules on self-help enabled a programme which impacted the Cuban economy and compromised the human rights of ordinary Cubans including their access to medicines and utilities. Despite White's even-handed treatment of the subject matter, there remains a strong impression that the US sanctions programme reflected the power imbalances which ebb and flow in international law and in this case embodied the punishment of an ingrate territory. Indeed by returning to the (now often overlooked) Bay of Pigs incident, its significance as an event not just for Cuba, but in assisting an understanding of ideologically-driven interventions (and indeed US imperialist inclinations) is also revealed. In a more comparative frame, the reader cannot help but be conscious of the parallel ‘Vietnam context’ during key points in the Cuban story. This gives considerable pause for thought, especially when it comes to reflecting on the author's critique of the application of notions of regime change and the operation of international humanitarian law. The book certainly prompts us to re-think issues of self-help and self-defence in international law and how their invocation can often be ironically self-destructive. White's exposition of the law of countermeasures is extremely helpful and it does appear that there is no better context for its illustration than the sixty years of US practice towards Cuba. The book also illustrates the problems regarding the unilateral enforcement of international law by individual states.

American hýbris: US Democracy Promotion in Cuba after the Cold War — Part 1

Cuba is probably one of the best examples of the significance of the democracy promotion discourse in US foreign policy: the efforts to democratise the island have been one of the main features in the US—Cuba bilateral relations since the end of the Cold War. Even the embargo against the island has evolved from a tool to generate regime change to an instrument of democracy promotion to foster a democratic transition. Today, the Cuban embargo, after the codifications of the 1990s, is intimately connected to a ‘Cuban democratic future’. Moreover, in the last three decades, US presidents have committed themselves to promote democracy on the island, inaugurating a sort of ‘state policy’ with little or no evolutions or changes. The main aim of this two-part article is to explore the rationale behind US decennial efforts to promote a peaceful democratic change on the island, while trying to answer some crucial questions about US strategy in Cuba: Why promote democracy in Cuba? Why did democracy promotion become a long-lasting feature in US—Cuba relations? The first part deals with the security framework, and American economic interests in Cuba as a crucial push factor for democracy promotion, while the role of the Cuban-American community and the problems and perspectives of US strategy will be included in the second part, to be published in the next issue of the Journal.

President Obama, the Crisis, and Latin America

Since his election in 2008, President Barack Obama has tried without success to disguise U.S. military initiatives and the neoconservative milieu inherited from George W. Bush without changing any of the government’s strategic goals. He has developed an economic plan similar to that of his predecessor, merely replacing fundamentalist neoliberals with pragmatic ones. More broadly, Latin America has practically been erased from the map in the White House. In particular, his administration has failed to deliver in three areas: ending the Cuban embargo, respecting democratic institutions in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, and abandoning its military agenda (the Colombia Plan, the Mérida Initiative, the Fourth Fleet). Whatever changes Obama’s presence may have introduced into the White House, Latin America remains forgotten.

Comments on the U.S.-Cuban Embargo

The U.S.-Cuban economic embargo has been maintained for more than 50 years, having been imposed in 1951 in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs. It is, and has been during this period, the most comprehensive and stringent of all U.S. embargoes. Yet, Cuba has never posed a military let alone economic threat to the U.S. This paper will analyze the reasons why I believe the Cuban embargo is wholly anomalous and deserves to be terminated or at least substantially modified by this administration. I will first review the existing components of the embargo including those that the Obama Administration has slightly liberalized. I will then compare our embargo policy against that of Cuba with the absence of such a policy directed at Vietnam, a country that bears many characteristics similar to those we see in Cuba. Finally, I will draw some conclusions and make suggestions for the future course of U.S.-Cuban relations

Soviet-Cuban Relations, 1985 to 1991: Changing Perceptions in Moscow and Havana , and: The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Embargo , and: Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the "Special Period" (review)

Reviewed by: Soviet-Cuban Relations, 1985 to 1991: Changing Perceptions in Moscow and Havana, and: The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Embargo, and: Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the "Special Period" Max Azicri Mervyn J. Bain , Soviet-Cuban Relations, 1985 to 1991: Changing Perceptions in Moscow and Havana. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007. 164pp. [End Page 126] Patrick J. Haney and Walt Wanderbush, The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Embargo. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 222pp. H. Michael Erisman and John M. Kirk, Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the "Special Period". Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. 360 pp. The scholarly works under review here discuss three major political events in the history of the Cuban revolutionary government, complementing one another in their subject, scope, and significance. Two of the studies cover parallel international issues: one examines the final years of the three-decade-long association with the Soviet Union and European socialism, while the other one covers the domestic American political forces that have driven Washington's never-ending dispute with revolutionary Cuba—which has become entrenched even further under President George W. Bush. The third study deals with the nature and conditions of Havana's more recent foreign relations policy (launched following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc), which has been carried out under the Special Period in peacetime, an emergency program that seeks to keep the regime alive. As happened earlier, a creative approach to foreign policy strengthens Havana's survival power at a particularly critical time and avoids following the self-destructive history of fellow socialist European regimes. Using primary and secondary sources, and the published memoirs of some of the political actors involved, Mervyn J. Bain provides an insightful account of some historic events that occurred while Mikhail Gorbachev was heading the Soviet Union. He examines some developments marking the end of the Soviet regime and how and why the Soviet-Cuban relationship ended. Although Gorbachev sought to improve socialism in his country and elsewhere, and even held the Cuban Revolution in high regard, his antidote for a sluggish economy and a political yearning for civic freedoms brought down the closed communist state. His two central reform policies, perestroika first (administrative and political reorganization) and later glasnost (openness in communication) created a bitter internal argument about the urgency for freedom of the press and a mixed economy. With respect to Cuba, Soviets argued that they should no longer subsidize Cuba's inefficient economy, especially while the Soviet Union was undergoing economic austerity programs. The powerful Cuban lobby in Moscow nevertheless worked vigorously to solidify and safeguard the special relationship with Havana. However, the combined effect of American pressure that demanded an end to the Soviet Cuban relationship, the material losses and human casualties of the ill-advised military intervention in Afghanistan, the increasingly poor performance of the economy, the assertiveness expressed by different nationalities in the country, the spreading secessionism among Soviet republics, and the separatist dynamics of socialist bloc members made the situation unmanageable for Gorbachev. The Soviet Union had to curtail its generous economic and military [End Page 127] support of Cuba. In late summer 1991, Prime Minister Gorbachev announced in front of U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (without having notified Havana in advance) the withdrawal of the Soviet brigade that had been deployed in Cuba for decades, symbolizing an end to socialist solidarity and support for the island's national security. Bain renders an enlightening account of a remarkable historic period, one full of miscalculations and unintended consequences. His proclivity to repeat himself almost verbatim throughout the narrative detracts somewhat from the study, but the summaries appearing at the end of the chapters are a welcome feature. Patrick Haney's and Walt Wanderbush's intelligent and needed study of the Cuban embargo makes one wonder why this book has not been written before. Although scholars have examined the subject, it has not received thorough coverage. This book offers a new approach to the Cuban Democracy Act. It views the act more as an American domestic political phenomenon than a foreign policy issue per se...

The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy

The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy

Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 222 pp.

Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 222 pp.

The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy ‐ Edited by Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush

The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy ‐ Edited by Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush

The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy

The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic Politics of an American Foreign Policy

Economic effects of the Cuban embargo on U.S. and Arkansas economies

Economic effects of the Cuban embargo on U.S. and Arkansas economies