Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana

Abstract

William M. Leogrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015) pb 560pp. ISBN: 978-1-4696-2660-4Reviewed by Steve LudlamWhen Cuban resistance finally produced Obama's abandonment of over half a century of violent US hostility to the Revolution, the obvious question arose as to why this had taken so long? What this book demonstrates is that, despite the decades of relations characterised by Cuba's revolutionary internationalism and US aggression through invasion, terrorism, assassination attempts against Cuban leaders, economic strangulation, and unending projects of internal subversion, there were repeated behind-the-scenes talks seeking to normalise those relations. The authors make the important point that, post-Cold War, the ending of US security concerns actually lowered its incentive to act. Domestic politics became more important, and, after all, US opposition to the Revolution's antiimperialism both preceded and survived Cuba's Soviet alignment.Written by two of the US's leading Cuba scholars, this monumental history is based on the major US and presidential archives, on an extensive secondary literature, and on nearly seventy interviews with leading political actors, including Fidel Castro and James Carter. It is also a culmination of years of excavation by the Cuba Documentation Project of the National Security Archive, which Peter Kornbluh directs.The book begins with Fidel's 'unofficial' visit to the US in April 1959, when he (and the US Ambassador in Cuba) assumed positive relations were possible. Eisenhower snubbed Fidel, preferring the golf course, prompting the famous photograph of Fidel and Che playing golf, taken, according to Fidel, to satirise Eisenhower's behaviour (p. 17). Nixon, in his stead, hectored Fidel on communist threats. A meeting with the CIA produced agreement to establish a back channel that was never opened. Within weeks the Revolution's agrarian reform accelerated the process of US counter-revolutionary policy that culminated in the full trade embargo and increasingly violent aggression. By the summer of 1959, the CIA was planning a counter-revolution.Yet, as this book makes clear, back channels remained open as the revolution radicalised, even through terrorist incidents like the La Coubre explosion in Havana. The secrecy surrounding such dialogue reflects Cold War constraints and the violence, sometimes murderous, of right-wing Cuban-American groups against 'dialogistas'. On the Cuban side, of course, suspicion and stubborn defence of sovereignty prevailed. Inevitably, then, some of the 'back' channels discussed throughout are not so much non-diplomatic channels as diplomatic channels rendered exceptionally clandestine by the historical sensitivity of USCuba relations.The book takes us in fascinating detail through such channels, and an extensive dramatis personae of officials, diplomats, and private intermediaries, most famously writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Their work was sustained across half a century of apparently frozen relations, and numerous destabilising events, most recently the shoot-down of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft, the Elian Gonzalez case, the jailing in the US of the 'Cuban Five', and in Cuba of US agent Alan Gross. …