At the Crossroads: The Cuban American National Foundation and the End of the Cold War

The chapter examines the highly atypical advocacy activities of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) during the last stage of the Cold War and in the course of the years of transition into a post-Cold War world that followed. Our primary research question concerns, in the light of significant interactions between CANF and the leadership of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, later the Russian Federation, the impact of CANF’s efforts on Soviet and Russian policy toward Cuba. While CANF did make some limited impact, a key finding emerging from the inquiry is that it is the transition process itself that was shaped by CANF and the extensive human network of contacts that it was embedded in and connected with—including, but not exclusively, within US and Russian policy-making circles. The way these contacts coalesced around particular convergent (albeit non-identical) understandings of the future gave rise to a transient strategic alignment of multiple tactical alignments that proved a driving force of change in the period concerned.