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Erisman, H. Michael. Cuba's Foreign Relations in a Post-Soviet World. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Map, tables, bibliography, index. 288 pp.; hardcover $55, paperback $24.95.
Michael Erisman has written a solid, scholarly analysis of Cuban foreign relations. At a time of intense-and divergent-pressures to rethink the nature of Cuban-U.S. relations, he presents a thorough, dispassionate treatment of the development of Cuban relations with the United States and other nations. Along with a careful overview of Cuban foreign policy since the revolution, he depicts a historical context in which to consider the evolution of that revolution.
Erisman makes the case early on for the uniqueness of Cuban foreign policy. He begins with the last lines of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken": "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,/ I took the one less traveled by,/and that has made all the difference." Cuba is, Erisman contends, one of those countries that has been a trailblazer rather than a follower. It has traveled down paths not taken by any other modern Latin American nation. The book endeavors to explain and explore the Cuban road, "devoting special attention to the foreign policy survival strategies that the Revolution has employed in the attempt to make...