There are two commonly held beliefs among Cuba specialists about the United States embargo on Cuba. The first is that the embargo is a frozen relic of the Cold War that has hardly changed over the years. The second is that the strongest lobbying group among Cuban Americans, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), is responsible for the endurance of this relic. This book's mission is to dispel these beliefs, and for the most part, it succeeds.
The authors' main argument is that the embargo has “changed greatly,” especially since the late 1980s. What began in 1960 as a coherent, executive-dominated policy has become today a fragmented law, characterized by loopholes, waivers, and inconsistent compliance. Further, Cuban Americans are not the main actors driving this evolution. By conducting a thorough review of sources, including government records, Patrick Haney and Walt Vanderbush marshal formidable evidence on their behalf. The result is an eloquently written book that, despite its brevity, is the most authoritative account to date of the history of the embargo since the 1980s.
The most compelling part is the compilation of the evidence on behalf of policy change. The embargo was designed to remain under the control of the executive branch, and for most of the Cold War, it stayed that way. However, after the 1980s, Congress began to play a more “activist” role and, with the 1996 Helms-Burton Bill, which codified the embargo into law, Congress achieved dominance. Furthermore, despite its reputation, the embargo has not stayed coherently hard-line. Although the Helms-Burton Bill toughened key provisions, Congress has nonetheless tolerated executive-branch efforts to waive most of them. Even under George W. Bush there is evidence of porosity—many Americans visit Cuba legally, U.S. companies are selling annually more than $150 million worth of food and medicine to the island, and few violators of the embargo actually get prosecuted. CANF might have been able to prevent the demise of the embargo, which is clearly a victory, but not its fragmentation and incoherence. For the authors, therefore, the intellectual task is to explain not policy endurance but policy change in the direction of porosity, inconsistency, and, more important, congressional domination.
Once the authors prove that the embargo became porous and inconsistent, they essentially won half the battle on behalf of their second thesis—that the influence of Cuban Americans has been secondary. Logically, if the embargo has lost much of its coherence, then CANF cannot be the main driver inasmuch as CANF advocates a hard-line policy. Something else must be driving the politics of the embargo.
That “something else” is Congress. The authors show how congressional forces—from both sides of the aisle—have become the main drivers of embargo politics since Ronald Reagan. But this part of the book, although rich in evidence, is conspicuously poor in theory. The story of the rise of Congress proceeds without an examination of (alternative) theories: A president emerges with an interest in promoting a policy change that is politically unpopular (Reagan's interest in hardening policy toward Cuba in the early 1980s). He “privatizes” policy, that is, helping to create an interest group to assist him politically (Reagan's involvement in launching CANF). At first, the president and the group collaborate, but over time, the group becomes more autonomous and begins to confront competition from other interest groups that hold opposite preferences (e.g., agricultural exporters interested in trade with Cuba). Congress becomes the favorite arena for this intergroup competition since the Constitution grants Congress primary powers on issues of foreign trade. This competition thus explains the rise of Congress and the fragmentation of policy.
This may be an accurate story, but theoretically, no new ground is broken, and herein lies my main frustration with the book: It is too complacent with a framework that amounts to a restatement of traditional pluralism. I could not help thinking about how the argument would differ, and acquire more sophistication, if the authors had employed standard comparative methods other than merely relying on archival research to develop alternative theories.
For instance, Haney and Vanderbush could have compared more carefully the range of political opinions among Cuban Americans, increasingly divided over policy toward Cuba. This would have allowed the authors to incorporate sociological theories of interest formation by immigrants, based on timing and circumstances of arrival. Alternatively, they could have compared CANF not just with another successful lobbying group, like the Israeli lobby, as the authors do, but also with less influential groups, such as Vietnamese Americans. Why were Vietnamese Americans even less influential than CANF? Even more intriguing, why do we see a bipartisan congressional team, led by Senators John Kerry and John McCain, both Vietnam veterans, cooperate with Bill Clinton to normalize relations with Vietnam, but not with Cuba? Does this have to do with differences among constituencies, differences between the target countries, or the fact that Cuba has produced no major American veteran of war and thus no sentiment by leading politicians to make amends with a former enemy? A comparison with Vietnam would have allowed the authors to probe theories about the psychology of making peace and about the strategic complexities of executive-legislative cooperation. Another possibility would have been a comparison with another country, such as Spain, which is also a democracy with a strong (pro-engagement) Cuba policy and a long-standing community of expatriate Cubans. Why have Cuban Spaniards been far less influential than Cuban Americans in shaping host-country policy? This cross-country comparison would have allowed the authors to assess whether differences in democratic institutions impact constituency influence on foreign policy.
Despite this wish list for more theory-testing comparisons, I remain impressed by the research in this book. And as with all good research, the angels are in the details, and one of the most precious details is that many U.S. presidents (except John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Reagan) have tried at some point to soften policy toward Cuba, even normalize relations—to no avail. That these efforts failed prior to the rise of CANF and continued after the rise of CANF supports the authors' contention about the secondary role played by CANF. Yet this begs a new question—why has normalization failed repeatedly?
Most of the scholarship on this question has looked at two culprits: Americans (have U.S. administrations been genuinely committed to improving relations with Cuba?) and Cuban Americans (do they have that much leverage?). The Cuban Embargo shows that the answer to the latter question is no and suggests that the answer to the former is yes. One other culprit remains unexamined—the Cuban government itself. Cuba claims to be interested in ending the embargo, yet every effort launched by the United States to normalize relations seems to be followed by a Cuban policy decision that essentially kills the initiative. Coincidence? Or is Cuba secretly uninterested in peace? Since most scholars on Cuba agree that the embargo serves the Cuban government well by helping the regime rationalize its rule, the thesis that Cuba might have an unspoken interest in prolonging the embargo is hardly preposterous. We have the theory; what we lack is a systematic review of evidence. One day, if Cuban government records ever become public, scholars ought to emulate the archival research carried out by these authors to probe the hypothesis that the longevity of the embargo is the result not of preferences by Americans or even Cuban Americans, but of Cubans themselves.
