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William M. LeoGrande & Peter Kornbluh Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.544 pp. (Cloth US$35.00)
Back Channel to Cuba is a timely and important book on the evolution of U.S.-Cuban relations, a must-read for students of Latin American and U.S. foreign policy. William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh analyze both the public and the secret (back-channel) negotiations between the two Cold War antagonists, revealing a history that goes beyond the conventional account of mutual hostilities. Its wealth of primary sources conveys a compelling story of fifty years of secret negotiations involving every U.S. president since Dwight Eisenhower.
The authors point out that even at moments of intense hostility there have always been reasons and opportunities for dialogue-dialogues that were kept secret because of the political sensitivity of the negotiations. "Sometimes the very intensity of the conflict and the imminent threat of violent confrontation was the catalyst for communication" (p. 409). Creative methods offered U.S. foreign policy makers "credible deniability" in their back-channel dealings with Havana. To limit the risks of direct contacts the United States and Cuba used third parties as conduits for communication. The...