What a difference a president makes. For decades, the United States’ relationship with neighboring Cuba had been mired in an antagonism that dated back to the late 1950s and included the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis, and several failed attempts to murder the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, among other things (for example, Schoultz, 2009). Then, during the presidency of Barack Obama U.S.–Cuban relations experienced a fundamental shift. Often times referred to as “Cuban thaw” especially by the media (for example, BBC, 2015; Hirschfeld Davis, 2015c; Phillips, 2015; The Economist, 2016a), the turnaround was actually much more far- reaching than the thawing metaphor suggests. Indeed, the president “ventured into diplomatic territory where the last 10 presidents refused to go” (Baker, 2014), culminating in the reestablishment of diplomatic relations after more than 50 years and the first visit to Cuba of a sitting U.S. president in Cuba in more than 85 years. One commentator even opined that those actions “finally ended the Cold War” (DeYoung, 2016). The question that this book seeks to explore concerns the role that President Obama played in this fundamental reorientation of U.S.–Cuba policy.

To some, this question might seem striking, if not outright puzzling. After all, why would policy changes ushered in by the Obama administration not be tied to the president? Indeed, episodes of major reorientations of countries’ foreign policies are often times associated with the leaders during whose tenure those changes occurred, including Richard Nixon in terms of U.S. foreign policy toward China, Willy Brandt for Western German policy toward the Soviet Bloc, or Yitzhak Rabin for Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. However, Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) scholarship, which refers to theory-driven explanations of foreign policy processes and outcomes (for example, Brummer and Oppermann, 2024; Kaarbo and Thies, 2024), is surprisingly indeterminate when it comes to accounting for the specific and distinct role of individual leaders in bringing about major redirections of foreign policy.