US Cuban Research Articles

Plane Hijackings between Cuba and the United States and the Opportunity for Diplomacy (1958–1973)

AbstractBetween 1958 and 1973, hijackings between Cuba and the US surged, prompting Cuban officials in the early 1960s to propose an extradition agreement for hijackers. However, the US, leveraging its superpower status, dismissed these initiatives, viewing hijackers as political asylum seekers rather than criminals. By the late 1960s, as hijackings escalated from the US to Cuba, the American approach shifted, seeking a bilateral agreement to address air piracy, only to be rebuffed by Cuba, which refused to accept the US’s categorization of specific hijackers as political asylum seekers while classifying others as criminals. Meanwhile, the US pressed its extradition stance through international bodies like the International Civil Aviation Organization. These diplomatic efforts underscored broader challenges in US–Cuban relations, with negotiations repeatedly missing opportunities for enhanced co-operation. A pivotal shift occurred after a significant incident threatened both nations, leading to a more balanced perspective between the US and Cuba. This change culminated in the 1973 signing of a ‘Memorandum of understanding’, marking a turning point that significantly curbed hijacking incidents and hinted at potential future improvements in bilateral relations.

The Effectiveness of Science Diplomacy between Adversarial States: Insights from US–Cuban and US–Iranian Science Collaborations

Summary The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the British Royal Society’s science diplomacy taxonomy has received much criticism. Some argue that there is a lack of empirical evidence to underpin the taxonomy’s three science diplomacy dimensions. This particularly applies to the third dimension, science for diplomacy, and its effectiveness. Others criticise the taxonomy for painting the picture of compliant scientists who would discard their academic ideals to support foreign policy objectives. Against the backdrop of these two points of criticism, this study investigates if scientists are willing to support political objectives through science collaborations. It also examines under which conditions science for diplomacy is effective. Using the epistemic community approach, expert interviews and a case study, the study argues that science for diplomacy is effective if it is promoted by a close-knit epistemic community and shows that scientists oppose the instrumentalisation of scientific collaboration for political purposes.

Economic and media war against socialist societies: The case of US–Cuban relations

This article examines the US’s use of sanctions or unilateral coercive measures (economic war) and the US’s support for propaganda communicated through its own organised mass media and the supposedly “independent,” corporate mass media as well as through social media to instigate anti-government sentiment and action (media war). The US’s economic war against Cuba began soon after Cuba’s 1959 revolution, although the US’s hostile actions as well as desires and efforts to shape Cuban society go back to the 19th century. This economic war has had tremendous negative impact on Cuba’s economy and the daily life of Cubans. In terms of the media war, this article focuses on how propaganda distributed through mass, corporate media as well as social media, often paid for by the US government, was directed at misleading Cubans and others, including those in the US, about the situation in Cuba. Such distortions were designed to provoke alienation and anti-government action by Cubans in general and, in more recent years, particular subgroups of artists, musicians, Afro-Cubans, and youth. And while some successes can be noted (specifically the sparking and broadcasting of protests on 11 July 2021), more generally the media war has failed in its goal of regime change. The non-event of 15 November 2021 is a clear example of this.

A New Scale for Global History

A New Scale for Global History

The results of Donald Trump’s anti-Cuban policy and the prospects for US–Cuban relations under Joseph Biden

After Donald Trump becoming US president, the process of normalizing US-Cuban relations was interrupted for four years. After his inauguration, as he had promised during the election campaign, he canceled almost all of the achievements of his predecessor in the area of improving bilateral ties and subsequently consistently tightened sanctions against Havana. This could have been due to the desire of Trump to provide a reciprocal ‘service’ to the ultra-conservative interest groups in Washington, D.C. whose substantial support was used during the elections. At the same time, the Republican, usually not inclined to caution in decision-making, gradually introduced new restrictions on interaction with the Latin American country and was in no hurry to use all instruments available at once. Probably, in this way Trump tried to keep for himself as long as possible the main ‘bargaining chip’, which the Island of Freedom became in his internal political game quid pro quo the new partners from among the ‘hawks’. Therefore, the White House began to take the most aggressive measures just on the eve of the 2020 elections and immediately after them. The victory of the Democrat Joseph Biden, who served as a vice-president in Barack Obama administration, did not allow the calculations of the ultra-conservatives to come true in full: Cuba withstood the pressure from the United States and there was hope that Washington and Havana would again meet at the negotiating table. But under what conditions the parties can return to the topic of normalizing relations is still unknown. In this sense, a lot will depend on the team of the elected president, senior officials who will be included in his team. In addition, the changes in regional international relations that have taken place in recent years will also play a role. The situation some six years ago, which prompted the White House to move closer to the Island of Freedom, has partially lost its relevance today. In this regard, the position of the Latin American states, the American-Cuban community in the United States, as well as the current balance of power in the Congress deserve special attention. The article uses a problematic approach, the main task of which was to analyze the main results of Trump’s anti-Cuban policy and to identify opportunities for improving US-Cuban relations during the Biden administration.

Writing Conflict to End Conflict: Reconciliatory Writing in Cristina García’s "Dreaming in Cuban," "The Agüero Sisters," and "King of Cuba"

The building of bridges between Cuba and the US has been ongoing for a long time, not least by artists. Reconciliation work preceding the commencement of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US encompasses, for example, novelist Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), The Agüero Sisters (1997), and King of Cuba (2013). I argue that these novels take on the task of lessening polarizations with the aspiration of furthering reconciliation processes through concentrating on the divisiveness between families and politics within the Cuban communities, focusing on the island Cubans and the US Cuban diaspora. García writes conflict to end conflict and this is, I claim, her strongest contribution to the reconciliation processes. In the last part of the article I briefly discuss how I use the concept of translation to theorize the relationship between fiction and reality.

Cuba and the Secret World

This article explores the career of Maj. Juan Rodríguez, who served in Cuban intelligence from 1958 to 1987. It discusses the origins and nature of the Castro regime’s security and intelligence services, including the development and prioritization of their missions. It identifies the milestones that defined these services’ institutional history. It connects this history to US–Cuban relations in the post-Cold War period. And it proposes a research agenda that will contribute to more equitable and integrated approaches to the modern and contemporary history of the Americas and the developing world, and to more diverse and representative security and intelligence studies.

EricHershberg and William M.LeoGrande (Eds.). 2016. A New Chapter in US–Cuban Relations. Social, Political, and Economic Implications. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 205 pp. $32, Paperback.

Latin American PolicyVolume 10, Issue 2 p. 292-296 Book Review Eric Hershberg and William M. LeoGrande (Eds.). 2016. A New Chapter in US–Cuban Relations. Social, Political, and Economic Implications. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 205 pp. $32, Paperback. Ana Covarrubias, Ana Covarrubias orcid.org/0000-0003-3180-0521 Search for more papers by this author Ana Covarrubias, Ana Covarrubias orcid.org/0000-0003-3180-0521 Search for more papers by this author First published: 30 October 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/lamp.12168Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume10, Issue2November 2019Pages 292-296 RelatedInformation

US–Cuban Relations, American Identities and the 1946 North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement

By 1946, Cuban–US relations had become strained over radio. Broadcasting from each nation repeatedly crossed borders and interfered with radio reception in the other country. The 1946 North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement (NARBA) attempted to remedy that problem. This account of the impassioned reactions and heated rhetoric surrounding the 1946 NARBA underscores the enduring strength of national and regional identities in a globalizing world. Encounters with US radio programming in Cuba inspired Cubans to fight for distinctly Cuban radio interests. The resulting 1946 NARBA, which imposed new restrictions on US broadcasting to benefit Cuba, provoked farmers from California and Arizona, who – as those who believed they were the most affected by the new restraints imposed on US radio – railed against their government’s acquiescence. Their reactions, in fact, were deeply entangled with the complex history of US identity formation, which had from the nation’s earliest years privileged specific regional loyalties that coexisted alongside both local and national ones. It is, in sum, a story that shows how in certain contexts audiences can and will resist globalizing influences by leaning on their existing national, regional, and local identities that provide meaning in their world.

Tour Guides’ Roles and Their Perceptions of Tourism Development in Cuba

ABSTRACTUS tourists had been exploring Cuba with government licensed local guides on cultural exchange trips since 1999. In 2016, changes in US–Cuban relations have further opened Cuba to US tourists and some loosening of the government controlled tourism system. This research examines tour guides’ role in formulating US tourists’ perceptions of Cuba before more free-market tourism, including tour guiding, was allowed. Cuban government guides that work with a US receptive operator were interviewed using a semi-structured script by a local bilingual researcher. Cohen’s [(1985). The tourist guide. Annals of Tourism Research, 12(1), 5–29. doi:10.1016/0160-7383(85)90037-4] tour guide communicative roles and Canally and Carmichael’s [(2011). Political economy of destination image: Manufacturing Cuba. Tourism Analysis, 16, 731–746] image model with government prism filter were useful to interpret findings. Cohen’s tour guide roles were found amongst the government employed guides except for fabrication. Canally and Carmichael’s [(2011). Political economy of destination image: Manufacturing Cuba. Tourism Analysis, 16, 731–746] model was supported by the omnipresence of guarded responses by tour operators and their adherence to government controlled jobs and messaging to tourists, particularly US tourists.

The great paradox: how Obama’s opening to Cuba may imperil the country’s reform process

This article examines the kind of development and political model most likely to emerge in Cuba, particularly in the wake of the gradual US–Cuban normalisation currently taking place. The rapprochement process, culminating with President Obama’s historic visit in March 2016, has unleashed stiff resistance in both countries. The liberal democratisation paradigm is held up against what we have termed ‘socialist neo-patrimonialism’, with both seen as alternative tools for assessing the direction of social transformations underway in Cuba, focusing on the debate about the role of the national private sector. Paradoxically, normalisation with the USA may so far have had the contrary effect of what President Obama had in mind in this respect: judging from the 7th Congress of the Communist Party in April 2016, it seems that resistance against economic reforms has hardened, caused by a fear that Obama’s charm offensive, combined with a strengthened entrepreneurial sector, will undermine the entire revolutionary project. The article concludes with a discussion of four development scenarios.

Language use and identity in the Cuban community in Russia

ABSTRACTA significant body of research has begun to explore the association between language and identity, a relationship that becomes more complex when considering multilingual communities. Important for this field, a number of studies have examined the interrelation between language and identity in the Cuban population in the USA, a case in which dominant (English) and minority language (Spanish) interaction has largely resulted in language maintenance and a positive correlation between language use and ethnic identity. While the Cuban population in Russia shares cultural and historical background with the well-studied US Cuban community, key differences allow for the examination of the role of several external factors (e.g. community size, lack of contact with monolingual speakers) on patterns of language use and identity. Employing quantitative survey methods and qualitative sociolinguistic interviews, the present study examines language use and language identity in the Cuban community in Russia, including both first and second-generation speakers. In contrast with the US Cuban community, results illustrate a shift towards the dominant language (Russian). Considering language and identity, results show the development of a dual identity, particularly among the second-generation speakers. The contribution of external factors on patterns of language use and identity is discussed.

Kennedy's Alliance for Progress: countering revolution in Latin America Part II: the historiographical record

Within weeks of his inauguration in January 1961, President John F. Kennedy proposed an Alliance for Progress: a $100 billion programme of economic, political and social development for Latin America. Its purpose was to tackle the causes presumed to have sparked the Cuban revolution, chiefly poverty and bad governance, and within half a year every Latin American state except Cuba committed to the goals of the Alliance. But within a few years even proponents of the Alliance doubted its efficacy, a pessimism which increased during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and more so under Richard Nixon. This review of the contemporary and historical literature on the Alliance sets that scholarship within the broader area of US–Latin American relations, with particular emphasis on US–Cuban relations from the 1960s until the twenty-first century. An important sub-theme is the peculiarity, the ‘exceptionalness’ of American political rhetoric, derived from and in turn shaping Americans’ sense of the history and the foreign relations of the US: the ‘American mission’ to the world.

Ending Decades of Animosity: Framing 2014 Thaw in US-Cuba Diplomatic Relations in the Washington Post and Miami Herald

On December 17, 2014, US President Barak Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro simultaneously announced from Washington and Havana that their countries would resume diplomatic relations ended half a century ago. But how did the US press frame the detente? Exploratory and comparative in nature, the study mainly and inclusively examinesvia qualitative and quantitative analysis-the US press’s coverage of the restoration of US-Cuba diplomatic relations. It seeks out the themes in newspaper opinion items in the Miami Herald and The Washington Post to explain the American public’s position and interpretation of Obama’s new Cuba policy.

Race to Cuba: Gerald Horne’s Race to Revolution

Among the strengths of Gerald Horne’s Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow is its timing; it arrives at the moment of the first real movement in US–Cuban diplomatic relations since the imposition of the blockade in 1962, and at the beginnings of what some are calling the third major US civil rights movement, in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. With his exigent, inventive research and his engaging, accessible voice, Horne argues that the arrival in Cuba of Made-in-the-USA Jim Crow at the end of the nineteenth century helped spark the organized fury and resistance that led to the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959. The book was published in 2014, and Horne couldn’t have known during the writing that he was resting his fingers on the vital pulses of uprising and cross-Straits connection that August 9 and December 17 would bring into the open; but his historian’s sense of the incipient power in the patterns of the past has served him well here, and is a gift to his readers, whether seasoned observers studying familiar events in light of new information, or young activists looking for bridges of solidarity, where US policies like the blockade have attempted to wash them away. If the blockade has tried to insist that the USA and Cuba are not connected, this book provides ample evidence to the contrary: in its portrait of pre-revolutionary Cuba as an outpost of UScontrolled race-based counterrevolution, and in its many descriptions of radical Black solidarity between the two nations.

Documenting The Crime of Cuba : An Américan Left and the 1933 Cuban Revolution

This article examines the cultural exchange between members of the US Old Left and Cuban Generación del 30 in the context of the 1933 Cuban revolution. US and Cuban radicals agitated for a “new Cuba” in their enlistment of proletarian art and class warfare using modernist devices. Documentary was the primary genre by which to exhibit revolution using a blend of oppositional politics and aesthetic experimentation. In transit were Clifford Odets, John Dos Passos, Walker Evans, Juan Marinello, and Pablo de la Torriente Brau, and journals, periodicals, pamphlets, and photographs where one found documentary to be the favored genre that offered the reader/viewer backstage access to horrific Cuban realities. Carleton Beals’s The Crime of Cuba (1933) is the preeminent documentary text in this oeuvre. But in purporting to discover the “truth” of Cuban conditions, the popular tome also discloses how documentary became another way to reinscribe Cuban alterity by well-intentioned northern radicals, thereby exposing inexorable divides in these gainful exchanges.

Geography, genre, and hemispheric regionalism

This essay introduces the concept of hemispheric regionalism as a way of understanding the expansive scales of oceanic and hemispheric perspectives. Drawing on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, hemispheric regionalism flattens the map, and makes visible three things: (1) the different coordinates in play; (2) the importance of the sea in these relations; and (3) the vehicles that travel between different geographic regions. Genre is that vehicle; popular romance mediates the distance and differences across the sea between the US and Cuba in the long nineteenth century. In its ability to retain multiple histories on its surface, the popular romances circulating prior to the Civil War, and long before dime novels, worked to entertain and make sense of the future of US–Cuban relations. The 90-mile waterway between the coasts became the most popular site of literary experimentation in news, notices, and periodicals awash with fascination and anxiety about Cuba. Editor, publisher, and writer Maturin Murray Ballou provides unique insight into the intersection of hemispheric regionalism and the work of romance in the period. It is, ultimately, the genre's capacity to manage multiple points of time along with its broad accessibility that appealed to writers such as Ballou. Through the popular romance, Ballou skillfully negotiated the anachronism of a hemispheric South that included the US and Cuba. Finally, Ballou thrived in a booming literary marketplace making him one of the more successful editors and writers of the antebellum years.

‘Ending the hegemonic presumption’? Recent writings on US-Cuban relations*

For over fifty years relations between the United States and Cuba have been antagonistic, with each side blaming the other for the continuing impasse. This Caribbean Cold War has seen an unsuccessful armed invasion of Cuba (popularly known as the Bay of Pigs invasion), the threat of nuclear war between the US and the USSR (the ‘Cuban missile crisis’), and an intensifying series of measures by the US government to reverse the Cuban social and political revolution of the 1960s. Since the early nineteenth century Washington has sought to control Cuba; and the US conditions for relaxing its pressure on present-day Cuba continue this tradition, itself part of a broader ideology (often short-handed as the Monroe Doctrine) which sees the western hemisphere as America's legitimate and exclusive ‘sphere of interest’. This article examines a number of recent works dealing both with the US–Cuban relationship, placing this relationship in historical and geopolitical contexts, and with the impact on Cuban society of the economic crisis of the 1990s caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Perfect Failure: the USA, Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, 1961

In 1961 the US Central Intelligence Agency master‐minded a sea‐borne invasion by Cuban exiles aimed at overthrowing the regime headed by Fidel Castro. With minimal logistical support from the USA the attempted counter‐coup launched at the Bay of Pigs was an unqualified disaster: a ‘perfect failure’, in the words of an authoritative contemporary. This essay locates the fiasco in the longer history of US–Cuban relations, concentrating on the Cold War years, the history of US political intervention and subversion in Latin America, and the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and the rise of Castro himself—both men offering different models of Latin American caudillismo (the power and cult of military strongmen). The essay concludes with an analysis of Cuba as an issue in US domestic politics and the impact of the Bay of Pigs in consolidating the Cuban revolution and setting the framework for the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

Scientists strive to boost US–Cuban collaboration

Scientists strive to boost US–Cuban collaboration