To date, most interpretations of Cuban-American relations since Castro's revolution have depended in great part upon the assumption of either unqualified benevolence or sordid malignancy in American diplomacy towards Cuba. Both these prejudices are false; American diplomacy has been of a highly ambivalent nature.

To understand this it might be useful to recall what few students of recent Cuban events have remembered, namely, that Castro's was only the second radical reconstruction attempt in Cuba to have posed problems for the United States.