In late 1988, as détente between Washington and Moscow blossomed, Fidel Castro told Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos:

There was no opening. For the next three years, as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, US officials pressed Mikhail Gorbachev to cut off all aid to Cuba. The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 meant that Havana was alone, and in desperate economic straits. Washington tightened the embargo, making it as difficult as possible for third countries to trade with Cuba. US officials hoped that hunger and despair would force the Cuban people to turn against their government. Even after they realised that the Cuban regime would not collapse, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and, until a few months ago, Barack Obama continued the embargo.

Why such hatred? Leycester Coltman, a former British ambassador to Cuba, wrote in 2003 that Fidel Castro was ‘still a bone … stuck in American throats. He had defied and mocked the world's only superpower, and would not be forgiven’ (The Real Fidel Castro, New Haven, 2003, p. 289). US officials and pundits pondered what to demand of the errant Cubans before Washington would deign to lift the embargo, forgetting that it is the United States that tried to assassinate Castro, carried out terrorist actions against Cuba and occupies Cuban territory, Guantanamo, the filthy lucre of 1898. Selective memory allows Americans to transform Cuba into the aggressor and the United States into the victim.

The persistent claim of US officials that the embargo was motivated by concern for democracy and human rights in Cuba was as risible as it was dishonest: the United States enjoys excellent relations with abominable dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia; and with rogue states like Israel, a colonial power whose settlements make a vicious joke of talk of a Palestinian state. It was not love of democracy or concern for the welfare of the Cubans that motivated US policy. The vote of the Cuban Americans and the desire for revenge, nothing more, explained the continuation of the embargo. Finally, President Obama has taken a long overdue step that marks the beginning of the end of a shameful chapter in US foreign policy.

It is this sordid chapter that Peter Kornbluh and William LeoGrande dissect in Back Channel to Cuba. The authors are well qualified to analyse the secret, on-again, off-again negotiations that occurred between Cuba and US presidents from Eisenhower through Obama. They have visited Cuba time and again over the last decades, developing an intimate knowledge of the country. Kornbluh has written path-breaking essays about US relations with Cuba. LeoGrande is the author of Cuba's Policy in Africa, 1959–1980, an extremely perceptive essay on Cuban policy in the Horn of Africa, published in 1980, at a time when no documents, Cuban, US or Soviet, had been declassified. This essay has stood the test of time and has remained the best discussion of Cuban policy in the Horn until now. It will be dethroned, after 35 years, by Nancy Mitchell's masterful analysis in her forthcoming book Race and the Cold War: Kissinger, Carter, and Africa (Stanford, 2015).

Kornbluh and LeoGrande have ferreted out every possible US source for Back Channel, documents, interviews, unpublished memoirs by protagonists. The result is impressive. Their examination of US policy is well documented, well argued and well written. Back Channel is, with Lars Schoultz's That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, by far the best study that we have of US relations with Castro's Cuba.

I have only one reservation about Back Channel, the same I had for Schoultz's superb book: it has no Cuban documents. When I read Back Channel I felt, as when reading That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, that I was watching a tennis match in which I could see only one of the players. The other was off camera.

This is not the authors’ fault; it is the inevitable consequence of the Cubans’ obstinate refusal to open their archives. To their credit, neither Schoultz, nor Kornbluh and LeoGrande, ever pretend to know more than they do, a rare virtue among scholars of US relations with Castro's Cuba, who so often feign knowledge of what Fidel Castro was thinking and what his ‘true’ intentions were. Schoultz, Kornbluh and LeoGrande, on the other hand, go only as far as their evidence allows them. I appreciate their restraint. And I appreciate how wisely, and carefully, Kornbluh and LeoGrande have used the few published memoirs of Cuban protagonists, which are generally superficial and unreliable. This restraint is testament to the seriousness and subtlety of their research.

I have one significant disagreement with Back Channel. Kornbluh and LeoGrande argue that

This is right on the money. They further explain that for Castro ‘at certain moments, other Cuban interests clearly outweighed better relations with the United States’. This, too, is true. But I disagree when they add that this was because ‘Castro calculated that Cuba had more to gain in its relations with Moscow and its standing in the Third World by intervening in Africa in the 1970s’ (p. 406). This is not consistent with the record. In November 1975, Castro defied Leonid Brezhnev by sending Cuban troops to Angola. In November 1987, he defied Mikhail Gorbachev by deciding to push the South African army out of Angola. Here I side with Henry Kissinger against Kornbluh and LeoGrande: in Years of Renewal, Kissinger admitted that in 1975 Castro had confronted Moscow with a fait accompli, and risked the Kremlin's anger, because he ‘was probably the most genuine revolutionary leader then in power’ (New York, 1999, p. 785). Castro sent troops because he understood that the victory of the axis of evil, Pretoria and Washington, engaged in a major paramilitary covert operation to impose their clients in Luanda, would have tightened the grip of white domination over the people of Southern Africa. Castro did not keep Cuban troops in Angola to please the Soviets, but, as the CIA noted, ‘to preserve Angolan independence’ from South Africa's aggression. As for the Cuban intervention in the Horn of Africa in late 1977 to defend Ethiopia from a Somali invasion encouraged by the Carter administration, the evidence from the Cuban, East German and Soviet archives shows that the Cubans believed, mistakenly, that ‘a real revolution’ was taking place in Ethiopia. It was this belief, not the desire to curry favour in the Kremlin, that led Castro to dispatch 13,000 Cuban soldiers to Ethiopia. What drove Castro's policy in Africa was his sense of mission; as the CIA concluded, he was a leader ‘engaged in a great crusade’ (Quotations from Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, pp. 113, 46, 25).

Obviously Castro's sense of mission was not the only force shaping his foreign policy, but it was its foundation. This sense of mission, rather than the desire to please Moscow or to impress Third World countries, was the engine of his foreign policy and outweighed the desire for better relations with the United States.

My disagreement with Kornbluh and LeoGrande on this point in no way clouds the fact that Back Channel is a tour de force that enhances our understanding of US policy towards Cuba since 1959.