Puerto Ricans: A Documentary History Book

Daniel Erikson's book is a good general overview of US-Cuba "relations" (if such a term can be used) in the Dubya years, with an astute projection beyond the '08 election. His attempt at even-handedness will be denounced by the usual suspects, yet there are a few misconceptions that lead me to give it four rather than five stars.

Small gaffs - like not knowing Castro wasn't confined on the "Isle of Youth" but the Isle of Pines, as it was then known - are usual stuff and easily overlooked. I have trouble with Erikson's conception of the Cuban-American relationship with Washington, as a "tail wagging the dog." This is patently not true, and Erikson has played into a carefully orchestrated Beltway construct. The Cuban-American community only has the influence Washington allows it, vetting "suitable" leaders and organizations who manage "the community" like a US version of the Cuban CDR, justifying hardline US policies as a "response" to the Cuban-American voter.

Erikson lets people speak for and explain themselves, and in so doing often gives them the rope to hang themselves. The heartlessness behind the 1990s legislation, designed to turn the screws on the suffering of Cuba's "Special Period" and then sabotage its mid-decade recovery, is exposed by its own creators. Most of all this endless grinding of sad, misanthropic bigotry shows that there is no possibility of a "third way" originating in either Washington or Havana; both parties have too vested an interest in the status quo.

And as irrational as it often seems, perhaps there's a wisdom embedded in this "Cuban standoff" after all. What does "normalizing relations" mean between a small, poor country and the world's remaining superpower, considering Cuba was a satellite regime in the full sense before 1959? Does Cuba really need new flocks of American sex and gambling tourists, mafiosi, drug traffickers, hucksters, con artists, and corporate land-grabbers in the name of "cultural exchange?" Or Cuban-American returnees fomenting civil war? Does the US need hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, legal and otherwise, swarming across the straits of Florida in a time of recession, with the current anti-immigrant backlash? The US Republican Party, for one, would simply collapse trying to straddle that fence. An iron curtain may not be the proverbial "good fence" either, but it can keep the neighbors (and their tail-wagging dogs) from each others' throats.