If one were to credit the electoral speeches of members of the federal Republican Party in the United States, one could be forgiven for concluding that the United States refuses on political but especially on moral grounds to have anything to do with the Castro regime in Cuba and certainly would never consider actually cooperating with it. Recent public statements of several of the political appointees President Bush has sent to deal with Cuban affairs at both the State and Defence Departments would ensure that only a very sceptical person indeed could doubt that for the United States, Castro is the ‘rogue president of a failed state’ and certainly not the sort of trustworthy head of state with whom the USA would be tempted to work.

Today's Republicans are not very different from their predecessors from either party and their public assessment of Cuba and its government, with the notable if not long-lived policy of the Carter government in the mid to late-1970s as an exception. Fidel has come under constant attack from almost all quarters in the US government virtually since he came to power in 1959 and few have been courageous enough to question conventional wisdom as seen in Washington and as insisted upon in Miami's Cuban-American community.

Hopes that this might change with a United States able to be more magnanimous in the wake of Soviet collapse after 1989 were soon dashed as Washington, under the influence of radical (and wealthy) elements of the Cuban-American lobby, sought to close in for the kill on what it saw as a now terminally weakened Cuban government, and did so with the infamous Torricelli and Helms-Burtons acts of 1992 and 1996 respectively. Rhetoric about the Cuban government, far from ceasing, became more shrill as the increasingly isolated extreme right wing of the Cuban-American community sought to keep the need to unseat Castro in the public arena.

The illness of Fidel from late July 2006 until today, and the willingness of Cuba's population to give the new government of his brother, Raúl, the benefit of the doubt, at first encouraged and then infuriated these elements as the prospects of a peaceful transition on the island gained ground. Calls for the violent overthrow of the government found no echo at all on the island and the already impressive irrelevance of ‘Miami’ to Cubans in the conduct of their lives reached new heights. This has lead to even more clamour for a harder line to finally end the regime from the most right-wing Cuban-Americans, now increasingly isolated from majority feeling in their own power base.

Against this background it is refreshing and long overdue to see that much of the rhetoric of the past was just that. Melanie Ziegler provides in her new book proof that when United States interests were in play in any serious way, the US has been more than willing to work with Cuba on matters of mutual concern, sometimes at the very height of poor bilateral relations. She also shows that in both countries there have been, at many stages, serious civil servants, diplomats and military officers keen to develop a limited relationship based on something other than vitriolic bombast.

While the title for the book, US-Cuban Cooperation Past, Present and Future, may be somewhat misleading in that the period covered is really only the 1990s and the first part of the new century, a clear exposition of the types and levels of cooperation is given, as well as its origins and policy context in both countries. Melanie Ziegler sets out to show us the motives of both governments in moving towards cooperation, the reasons why such cooperation has not been made public in the US, and the state of such cooperation under the present Bush government. With even more daring the author then asks if such successful cooperation as there has been to date could not offer a model for more in the future.

Much of the discussion in the book revolves around the concept of confidence building between the two states and the measures (CBMs) that can help to build such confidence. Thus she spends a very large part of the book dealing with defence (in the widest sense) cooperation spanning the efforts in drug interdiction, illegal immigration control, security in and around the US base at Guantánamo, and wider efforts to avoid open conflict.

This book could hardly be more timely. The pretence that the USA is somehow morally shocked by the Cuban regime, and that thus cooperation with it is impossible, is shown to be palpably false. At the same time it is rather disappointing that Ziegler does not move somewhat away from the military angle of this issue to that of the significant economic dimension of US-Cuban relations today, despite the constraints of US policy on such dealings. The United States now constitutes one of Cuba's major trading partners in the world and this situation, at least as much as the defence context, gives the lie to the accusation that Washington views Havana as an immoral and untrustworthy partner in international affairs.

It might also have been useful to ask as well why the Cuban government downplays bilateral cooperation almost as much as does that of the United States. The Cuban government also uses ferocious rhetoric when describing the USA and has done so since it came to power. It cannot then appear to its own public to be in bed with the very ‘enemy’ who is blamed for almost all of the ills the nation has suffered over the last half-century. While the United States must take most of the responsibility for the situation we have known, it is not alone in keeping its public from knowing the existence and extent of bilateral cooperation between the two nations.

This book provides a good first step towards understanding the nature of the US-Cuban relationship behind the war of words. It should be read by anyone interested in Cuba's foreign relations, the US role in Latin America, or just those interested in understanding the relationship between rhetoric and reality in international relations. It is to be hoped it stimulates others to investigate other elements of this curious story.