Cuba: Confronting the U.S. Embargo

The Soviet Union is history, but Castro still reigns, cigar intact, in Cuba. Schwab, a professor of political science at SUNY-Purchase, eloquently delineates the human toll of an American policy that--however one feels about Castro--most would call a failure. If Schwab seems a little anachronistic and credulous in his acceptance of Castro's justification for his dictatorship (weren't similar defenses mustered on behalf of the ""People's Democracies"" of Eastern Europe?), his book is a smoothly written account of the effects of the U.S. embargo. He reviews the history of U.S. hegemony over the Caribbean and recaps the Cuban revolution (its achievements, shortcomings and American efforts to topple it), and he assesses prospects for Cuba after Castro. Despite its manifest failure to bring an end to the Castro regime, the embargo, first imposed in 1960, remains in place, its impact augmented by the collapse of the Cuban economy following the dissolution of the Eastern bloc. Interestingly, one of the ways Castro dealt with his country's economic anxiety in the 1990s was to relax restrictions on religion and allow a papal visit in 1998. Schwab focuses on the devastating effects of the embargo on Cubans' health care and nutrition and forcefully condemns the U.S. for claiming to uphold human rights while sponsoring a policy that ""imposes starvation on an entire people."" His distinction between the Western notion of human rights--civil and political rights--and what he calls the socialist or Third World concept of economic and social rights is a clear expression of an old and durable argument that, as Schwab asserts, seems likely to outlive its Cold War origins. (Feb.)