This work is valuable to anyone wanting a one-volume survey of the best secondary literature in English concerning the political history of U.S.-Cuban relations. Its greatest strength is its comparisons of dissonant views within the secondary literature. Mazarr assesses the reasonableness of varying interpretations of such subjects as: the motives behind U.S. expansion, the effect of the Platt Amendment, the policy influence of the U.S. business community, the State Department’s attitude toward Batista, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and Reagan’s policy toward Castro. The book reads like a fine college text, proceeding chronologically and discussing each major policy and each administration. Mazarr includes enough references to social, economic, and cultural developments to give policy some of the necessary context.
While the book ably summarizes the literature, it does no more than that. It makes no original contribution. Its conclusions, that the United States was a dominant factor in Cuba and that this helped turn Cuban nationalism in an anti-Yankee direction, are hardly new. Mazarr simply concludes that the best of the secondary literature in English supports them. No Spanish-language sources are cited.
The book has more than its share of factual and typographical errors. Among the latter is the constant misspelling of the last name of U.S. Ambassador Beaulac. The former include the misidentification of Frank País as a leader of the Directorio Revolucionario (p. 233).
Perhaps the most serious weakness is the last-minute attempt to add social science theory of the middle range. Having written a political narrative, Mazarr constructs a decision-making model in the last chapter in an attempt to add rigor to his analysis. This model of U.S. behavior toward Cuba has as its core the goals of security and power. These goals (treated as consistent and unambiguous) are constrained by a variety of factors: partisan politics, economic resources, individual psychology, and the like. With this model in hand, Mazarr concludes that one-dimensional explanations are flawed and that objectivity is achieved by eschewing ideology and following the complexity of events toward moderate conclusions—those which reflect the multiplicity of causal forces. This seems reasonable—though not necessarily true—but Mazarr makes as much of his truth (of the middle way) as do the ideologues he hopes to slay. Moreover, his thesis leads to a tedious, continual “on-the-other-hand” style of writing. While a summary of the secondary literature in English is of value, a work that opened up new avenues of interpretation would have been preferable. To do that, however, Mazarr would have had to enter the dangerous realm of ideology or, at least, to have recognized that the middle way is no less subjective than the poles.
