Political Science Quarterly
Volume 114 No. 2 (Summer 1999)

 

Anatomy of a Failed Embargo: U.S. Sanctions Against Cuba
By Donna Rich Kaplowitz. Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998
Reviewed by Jorge I. Domínguez

 

This book provides a thorough description and assessment of the U.S. policy of comprehensive sanctions on Cuba from the policy’s start in 1960 until about 1997. The chapters are arranged chronologically to narrate the policy’s evolution and to indicate both the major and the minor modifications adopted over time. The book highlights four principal historical periods that correspond roughly to the four decades of President Fidel Castro’s rule.

In the 1960s, the United States imposed the embargo, made it increasingly comprehensive, and sought to multilateralize it with some limited success. In the 1970s, the United States dropped the extraterritorial dimensions of its sanctions policy toward Cuba and made some attempts to find a basis for accommodation with the Castro government. In the 1980s, the United States tightened its sanctions policies yet again.

Cuba suffered economically, but the United States did not achieve its main political objectives: the Castro regime did not fall, its key domestic policies were not reversed, the properties of U.S. citizens and firms were not returned, the Soviet-Cuban alliance was not severed. Cuba supported revolutionary movements and revolutionary states vigorously, even deploying hundreds of thousands of troops to Africa during the Carter and Reagan presidencies. The harshness of authoritarian rule in Cuba declined somewhat over time but mainly as the result of the regime’s consolidation.

In the 1990s, several of the principal U.S. political objectives in Cuba were achieved thanks to an exogenous event: the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuba terminated its support for revolutionary movements. It repatriated its troops that had supported revolutionary states. The Cuban-Soviet alliance died. The U.S. policy of sanctions returned to its original goal of toppling Castro, but this goal has yet to be achieved.

Kaplowitz succeeds less, however, at explanations. She employs, in essence, a check-list compilation of insights drawn from other scholars who have engaged in the comparative study of sanctions policies to understand their likelihood of success. Some of the arguments she proposes to apply specifically to the Cuban case are either underdeveloped or unpersuasive. For example, she claims that the U.S. embargo has been always undermined by interagency conflicts within the U.S. government, but she provides little plausible evidence. She asserts that presidential campaigns serve as “architects” (p. 79) of policy toward Cuba. That was certainly the case in 1960, 1980, and 1992 but not in other instances, yet she does not provide an explanation of the reasons for such variance.

She foregoes the opportunity to widen her scholarly horizon. For example, she could have compared the inefficacy of U.S. economic coercion on Cuba to the striking efficacy of Soviet economic coercion on Cuba the one time this occurred (in 1968, over an array of issues in Soviet-Cuban relations). She might have considered the hypothesis (not mentioned even once) that the embargo was the “moderate” alternative at critical junctures to avoid employing U.S. military force against Cuba, and that this may explain its long endurance as the least-bad policy option. This is a plausible interpretation of U.S. decisions in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the missile crisis. It is one way to understand why the Reagan administration did not use U.S. troops to “go to the source” in 1981-1982 despite its high alarm over Cuban support for Salvadoran guerrillas. And it is a reasonable interpretation for the Clinton administration’s acceptance of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act (which tightened and codified U.S. sanctions policies) right after the Cuban Air Force shot down two unarmed civilian airplanes over international waters.

This book should, nonetheless, serve as a helpful reference work for those who seek evidence concerning one of the longest-lasting and least successful U.S. policies ever conducted.