Cuba as an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Louis A. Pérez, Jr.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
As a nation we seemed unable to maintain a sense of perspective about Cuba.
–Cyrus R. Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in America’s
Foreign Policy (New York, 1983)
The rationale of the Cuba policy no longer commands credibility. No longer can the
policy be assumed to derive its raison d’être from the realm of the plausible. Disinterested
observers–which is to say, much of the world–are most assuredly correct to suspect that Cuba is a
peculiar American obsession. Eleven presidential administrations, including Democrats and
Republicans, liberals and conservatives, have failed to resolve what must be considered a policy
anomaly of singular distinction: more than 50 years of political isolation and economic sanctions,
longer than the U.S. refusal to recognize the Soviet Union, longer than the hiatus of normal
relations with China, longer than it took to reconcile with post-war Vietnam. Cuba has been
under U. S. sanctions for almost half its national existence as an independent republic.
U.S. relations with Cuba–or perhaps more correctly, the U.S. relationship with Cuba–is a
complex matter. The subject of Cuba has rarely been a topic of reasoned disquisition. It defies
facile explanation, and certainly cannot be understood solely–or even principally–within the logic
of the policy calculus that otherwise serves to inform U.S. foreign relations, mostly because it is
not logical.
This is not to suggest that the policy of sanctions is without political constituencies, of
course. Considerations of domestic politics as a determinant of foreign policy are not without
precedent. Cuba is no exception. Influential Cuban-American interest groups have acted with
single-minded advocacy in behalf of the embargo. Lobbyists and political action committees,
including the Free Cuba Political Action Committee, the U.S.-Cuba Democracy Political Action
As a nation we seemed unable to maintain a sense of perspective about Cuba.
–Cyrus R. Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in America’s
Foreign Policy (New York, 1983)
2
Committee, and the Cuba Libre Political Action Committee, among others, have channeled
substantial financial resources into the electoral system in behalf of hard-line policies against
Cuba. That the state of Florida looms large in national elections, moreover, has further enhanced
the political importance of the Cuban-American vote, long presumed to favor continuation of
sanctions. Candidates for national office, whether in primary contests or general elections, tread
lightly on the subject of Cuba while campaigning in Florida, persuaded that the safe course is the
hard-line course so well-trodden by almost every presidential candidate to have visited the
Sunshine State for the last 50 years.
More:
https://sta.uwi.edu/iir/normangirvanlibrary/sites/default/files/normangirvanlibrary/images/Cuba_as_an_obsessive_compulsive_disorder.pdf
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