Back Channel to Cuba

William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh spent years assembling hundreds of formerly secret U.S. government documents and interviewing key figures — including Fidel Castro and Jimmy Carter — to document fifty years of back-channel diplomacy between Washington and Havana. The result is a scholarly diplomatic history that challenges the assumption of permanent standoff, showing that every president from Eisenhower through Obama sent quiet feelers across the Florida Straits. The updated paperback, released after the December 2014 Obama-Castro rapprochement, captures the culminating breakthrough the authors had been tracing for decades. The honest caveats: the academic tone demands patience from general readers, and the subject matter — Cold War politics, communist Cuba, covert diplomacy — is highly specialized. For readers with genuine interest in foreign policy history or Latin American affairs, this is authoritative and significant. Worth It.