When the Berlin wall came down, many Cuban-Americans eagerly anticipated the imminent fall of Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba. “Next Christmas in Havana,” read the bumper stickers in Miami. But most scholars studying Cuba doubted that Castro would be so easily dislodged. They cited manifest differences between Cuban and European communism: Cuba had an authentic revolution that began with broad support, whereas communism arrived in most of Eastern Europe in the rucksack of the Red Army. Cuban nationalism bolstered the legitimacy of a government in conflict with the United States, whereas European nationalism corroded the legitimacy of regimes beholden to Soviet Russia. The standard of living in communist Europe paled in comparison to that of the West, whereas Cuban conditions compared favorably to much of Latin America and the Caribbean. European communist regimes were led by colorless bureaucrats who had long since lost faith in their own ideology, whereas Cuba was still led by the charismatic Fidel Castro and the generation that made the revolution.

Juan J. López also wants to explain why there was no transition in Cuba by comparing it to communist Europe, but he sets himself the task of proving these scholars wrong. Castro's survival was not the result of these oft-cited conditions, he argues. Castro could have been overthrown in the early 1990s and could still be overthrown today. Conditions prevailing in Cuba are not fundamentally different from those prevailing in communist Europe in 1989. The critical difference, according to López, is that Washington has not given adequate support to Cuban dissidents.

This is a hard case to make, since the theories that foresaw Castro's survival have predictive validity on their side. López tries to refute them by showing that each factor they cite as distinguishing Cuba from Eastern Europe was actually present to some degree in at least one of the European cases. From this he concludes that none of these factors can logically explain why Castro survived. But he examines each factor in isolation, rather than seeing them as a constellation of contributing causes, which is how most scholars view them. This mechanistic approach misses the possibility that the Cuban case might be explained by the interaction of several contributing causes not replicated in any one European case. The single conventional factor López thinks is valid in explaining Castro's survival is regime repression, yet this is the one dimension on which Cuba is most similar to communist Europe and, by López's logic, is therefore the least useful explanatory variable.

Why did Europeans suddenly rise up despite state repression, whereas Cubans did not? López argues that Cubans lacked a sense of political efficacy, a belief that action could effect change. Social movement theorists studying the European transitions have found that a growing sense of efficacy catalyzed the expansion of dissident activity from a few hundred people to hundreds of thousands. López may be right; perhaps all the necessary conditions are in place for a Cuban transition from below, all except this one missing piece. But while efficacy is a necessary condition for mass mobilization, it is not sufficient, and so the absence of mobilization is not evidence of a lack of efficacy. It is equally plausible that Cubans have not mobilized against the regime because they prefer Fidel Castro's socialist welfare system to the likely alternatives; or because they fear that a transition might be violent; or because they fear the return of the largely white Cuban upper class that fled to Miami in 1959; or because they fear the reimposition of U.S. hegemony; or simply because the disaffected prefer exit to voice; or all of the above.

The only way to ascertain the subjective reasons that Cubans have not mobilized against their government would be to ask them, and this we cannot easily do. As an alternative, López relies heavily on a University of Florida survey of exiles and a survey of dissident organizations in Cuba. While acknowledging the limitations of this information, he argues that we have to make due with it because it is all we have. In fact, it is not all we have. A number of polls have been taken in Cuba over the past decade, an independent one by CID-Gallup for the Miami Herald and several by Cuban scholars. They have their limitations, too, of course, but at least they are representative samples. López relies uncritically on the dissident polls as an accurate gauge of Cuban opinion in general. As the CIA learned to its dismay at the Bay of Pigs, exiles are poor judges of public opinion in the homeland they fled.

Having concluded that only a lack of political efficacy stands between the Cuban people and democracy, López argues that only a lack of resources prevents the dissident movement from boosting the population's sense of efficacy. He attributes this lack of resources to the unwillingness of the United States—President Bill Clinton in particular—to expand Radio and TV Martí broadcasts or to provide the dissidents with significant aid. “The Clinton administration actually sought to maintain the status quo in Cuba rather than promote a transition to democracy,” he argues (p. xxviii). This is both unfair and untrue. U.S. officials did say, as López recounts, that a violent transition producing a migration crisis would not be in the interests of the United States. But that is a far cry from trying to preserve the status quo. Some Clinton officials sought to engage Cuba in hopes of promoting liberalization. Others favored continued economic pressure in hopes of hastening Castro's collapse. But all would have welcomed a Czech-style, nonviolent transition to democracy.

Unfortunately for the reader, López appears to have finished writing Democracy Delayed in 2000 because he does not mention either the Varela Project, whereby dissidents were able to mobilize more than 10,000 Cubans to sign petitions calling for a referendum on democracy, or the 2003 arrest and imprisonment of 75 dissidents on charges of having accepted aid from the United States (precisely the sort of aid López advocates). Varela's success indicated a degree of strength in the dissident movement that few observers expected, but the arrests demonstrated the regime's continuing ability to repress dissent without sparking broader mobilization.

López's contention that Washington has been soft on Castro and is therefore to blame for his survival may soon be put to the test. In May 2004, President George W. Bush announced that he intends to do exactly what López recommends—boost the signal strength of both Radio and TV Martí and expand U.S. support for Cuban dissidents. If that policy is carried out, we will see whether López's theory of transition in Cuba has as much predictive validity as those he criticizes.