A review of: The Routledge Handbook of Latin America and the World
Edited By Jorge Domínguez and Anna Covarrubias
Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, 2014, 482 pages
On December 17, 2014, after U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro simultaneously announced the decision to move towards normalizing bilateral relations—after more than half a century of estrangement—there was little backlash. Cubans cheered, and even in Miami’s traditionally hardline Cuban American community, criticism was muted. A counterproductive policy, linked to the Cold War and frozen in time, had at last been adapted to the 21st century.
That development, which secured Obama’s legacy in Latin America and took away virtually the only U.S. policy stand unifying the entire region against it, came too late to be included in this excellent and impressively wide-ranging volume co-edited by Jorge Domínguez of Harvard University and Anna Covarrubias of El Colegio de Mexico. The book systematically reviews the dramatic changes that have taken place since the Cold War to the present, not only in inter-American affairs but especially in Latin America’s global relations. Until now, U.S.-Cuba policy had been an outlier, notably out of sync with most of Washington’s other approaches towards the region.
