Review of Mexico in Transition by Byron Crites

Book Reviews
partly explained its opposition to popular carnival). Here, his decision to focus on the
writers Adrián del Valle and Antonio Penichet is commendable and useful, although
it must be said that the repeated use of their literary works at the end of some earlier
chapters, to illustrate attitudes (to race, nationalism and so on) does not work especially
well; mostly, these sections are too short to come across as anything other than
fascinating afterthoughts.
Indeed, one criticism of the whole book might be that Shaffer perhaps tries to say
too many things, with some chapters as a result being frustratingly short; one cannot
help feeling that a greater impact might have come from a narrower focus, either on
the political impetus or the counter-culture. However, whatever the minor faults, the
overall effect of the book is of a challenge that is well sustained and argued and one
which stresses the genuinely radical critique (rather than action) which Cuban anarchism
offered.
Antoni Kapcia
University of Nottingham
Haney, Patrick J. and Vanderbush, Walt (2005) The Cuban Embargo: The Domestic
Politics of an American Foreign Policy , University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh),
xi + 222 pp. $24.95 pbk.
As the title of this book indicates, this is a detailed analysis of the US governmental
processes that have produced the economic embargo on Fidel Castro, and not so much
of the USA embargo policy itself. The authors give us passing hints that they disapprove
of the embargo and regard it as a failure, but they mostly offer a very evenhanded
discussion of the policy and its impact. Unlike many critics who regard the
policy as a clear and obvious mistake, they do not portray the process that produced
it as pathological or as the simple result of an overly-infl uential community of anti-
Castro Cuban émigrés who have clustered in Miami.
The book instead shows how a very complicated interaction of domestic interests
and political personalities, changing over time, has produced the embargo policies and
how such policies themselves have been uneven. While one can see a certain broad
continuity, of course, in the embargo that has lasted from Eisenhower all the way to
the second Bush administration, the authors also note how the embargo has been
changing in form over time and show how the process has seen power shift from the
President to the Congress, and to various private-sector groups (not just the Cuban-US
lobby) over these fi ve decades. The role of the Cuban-US community and in particular
of the Cuban US National Foundation (CANF), is discussed in some detail, and avoids
trading caricatures of this lobby.
The book is very well written, and exhaustively researched, drawing in analogies
with the role of Congress and private groups, on such other ethnically-charged foreign
policy issues as US attitudes on Taiwan or Israel. It is thus valuable reading for anyone
specialising in US foreign policy and the evolving relationship between Congress and
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Society for Latin American Studies
132 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 26, No. 1