Wayne Smith spent many of the years between 1957 and 1982 as a U.S. State Department official concerned with Cuba. His review of those years, though without the kind of documentation most useful to scholars, marks him as one who has managed to overcome the paternalism and ethnocentrism that colored U.S. views of prerevolutionary Cuba, as well as the paranoia and vengeance that have marked North American attitudes in the Castro era. One of the themes of the book is that the fear and hostility generated in Washington during the 1960s—when Castro nationalized the massive U.S. investments in Cuba and threatened to undermine U.S. influence throughout Latin America—are no longer appropriate.
Smith is no apologist for Castro, but he is very critical of longstanding U.S. unwillingness to make peace with the Cuban Revolution. He attributes this to Washington’s inability to see the pragmatic side of Castro’s foreign policy, its growing moderation and Castro’s periodic efforts to ease tensions between the United States and Cuba. Most of Fidel’s overtures, Smith claims, have gone unexplored or have foundered on Washington’s need to come out with a palpable strategic or political victory so as to somehow erase the deep wound inflicted on U.S. power and pride by the rise of a communist regime in one of its oldest and closest satellites.
After almost 30 years of political and economic infighting, Smith finds irony in the current picture, accepted throughout much of the Third World, of a moderate and pragmatic Havana regime confronted by an ideologically driven Washington administration. Smith calls not only for the end to covert warfare against Cuba, but for a recognition that Castro—despite his abiding suspicion and antagonism toward the United States—is now more of a Third World elder statesman than a fanatic revolutionary. While not defending Cuban foreign policy. Smith laments the fact that as Castro moved toward traditional diplomacy and détente, he was faced with a Reagan administration emphasizing hostility and subversion.
Smith calls for a return to respect for international law and realistic bargaining as a better way to secure U.S. hemispheric interests. One of the weaknesses of the book, however, is that Smith does not examine the nature of those interests and their relationship to the violent social change in the Third World that Washington finds so disturbing. Smith’s analysis of U.S. foreign policy is limited to a recommendation that it should be more willing to disassociate itself from failing authoritarian regimes and more willing to accept the governments that replace them. His argument is based on a policy of realism that assumes that political and economic warfare against such regimes will only make them more hostile and more likely to eliminate the moderating parties and institutions that are the natural allies of continued U.S. influence. Such flexibility is admirable, but may be itself unrealistic. It assumes that the historic U.S. hegemony in Latin America has not created counterforces unamenable to U.S. influence, and that there are no deep-seated U.S. interests within the structure of the old regimes from which Washington cannot easily disengage. The principled realism advocated by Smith may he more applicable to resolving U.S.-Cuban tensions in Africa than in Central America.
Despite its limitations, Smith’s picture of Castro as a rational antagonist rather than as a Soviet strategic pawn or a crusading revolutionary is a message that the incoming administration in Washington would do well to consider. Even an administration committed to better relations with Cuba, however, faces internal barriers. Smith does a good job of describing how the initial Carter effort to explore detente with Cuba was undone by pressure from Congress and by the division within the White House between a cold-war-oriented National Security Council headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski and a North-South-oriented State Department headed by Cyrus Vance. These and other harriers notwithstanding, Smith has introduced a note of reason into the debate. Perhaps the presence of someone like Smith in a policy-making position would he a sign that the deep wounds of the Cuban Revolution had begun to heal.
