| Summary/Abstract |
In April 1993, just days after Roberto Robaina became Cuba’s foreign minister, he received a proposal for migration talks from the United States, the world’s only superpower and the greatest threat to his government. He had to recommend to Cuban President Fidel Castro what to do with it. The intelligent but inexperienced foreign minister could not help but turn to his senior colleagues for counsel. He wrote to Ricardo Alarcón, the former foreign minister and president of the National Assembly of People’s Power; Abelardo Colomé, minister of the Ministry of the Interior; and José Ramón Balaguer, head of the Cuban Communist Party’s departments of ideology and international relations.1 As it turned out, the decision was not controversial. Regardless of the popular image of Cuba as the ideological antithesis to the United States, no one in the top echelon of Cuban leadership opposed migration talks with their northern neighbor.
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