Beginning on Thanksgiving Day 1999, and for many months to follow, the impact of diaspora groups on US international and domestic politics became strikingly clear when Elian Gonzalez’s mother drowned, along with ten other Cuban refugees, while trying to reach South Florida’s shores. Six-year-old Elian survived and reached the US, but only to suffer another torrent, once in the US, of lawsuits, custody battles, and a shameless political tug of war. Cubans on the island demanded that the boy be sent back to his father, who was still living in Cuba and pleading for the return of his son. Cuban Americans in Miami, including relatives of Elian, refused to return the boy to the “Communist tyranny” his mother had died trying to escape. This battle over one little boy’s fate is just the most recent episode in a case that has, for over thirty years, illustrated the dedication (in this case antagonistic) that diasporas can maintain toward a homeland, the energy they can and will expend to influence US foreign policy toward that homeland, and the profound as well as profoundly complex implications of diaspora identity and mobilization for US politics and the US political system.
Sanctions as tools in the US foreign policy after the cold war