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Spadoni, Paolo. Failed Sanctions: Why the U.S. Embargo against Cuba Could Never Work. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010. xxv + 230 pages. Cloth, $34.95.
This reviewer has been studying Cuba and the Cuban Revolution since the fall of 1979. Failed Sanctions is one of the most informative books I have read about Cuba to date. It explores why U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba have failed and how the U.S. government and its citizens have, in fact, actually "played an important role in the [survival of] the Cuban economy" (p. xxiv).
Political scientist Paolo Spadoni begins his book with a review of the efficacy of U.S. post-WWII economic sanctions. Sanctions are applied "... to lower the aggregate economic welfare of a target state by reducing international trade in order to coerce the target government to change its political behavior" (p. 3). The success rate of sanctions, when unilaterally applied by the United States, has decreased from a high of 62% between 1945 and 1969 to a low of 18% between 1990 and 2000. This decline matches that of the global significance of the U.S. economy and the rise in the importance of transnational corporations (TNCs) and other international...