Island of Shadows: America's Cuba Obsession and the Path Forward

Ninety miles from Florida, an entire nation is going dark — and Washington is keeping the lights off on purpose.For sixty-five years, the United States has waged the longest economic siege in modern history against Cuba — an island its own Defense Intelligence Agency calls a negligible military threat. Six decades. Eleven presidents. Not one of the embargo's stated goals achieved.In Island of Shadows, Gregory A. Ellsworth traces the full arc of America's Cuba obsession: from the Platt Amendment and the mob-run casinos of 1950s Havana, through the Bay of Pigs and the thirteen days that nearly ended the world, to the “Donroe Doctrine” and the maximum-pressure campaign of 2025–2026 — as hospitals run on failing generators and Cubans flee the island by the million.Drawing on declassified memos, government records, international monitors, and on-the-ground reporting, Ellsworth builds an unflinching, deeply sourced case: the embargo has failed on every metric that matters. It has strengthened the regime it was meant to topple, punished the families it claims to defend, and pushed Cuba into the arms of China and Russia—ninety miles from American shores.This is not a defense of authoritarianism, and not the comforting myth that sanctions deliver democracy. It is a clear-eyed reckoning with how a narrow exile politics captured a superpower's foreign policy for two generations—and a concrete blueprint for what should replace it.The Cold War's last battleground. The case for finally ending it.For readers of serious foreign-policy and modern-history nonfiction: a definitive, fully cited account of U.S.–Cuba relations from 1898 to the unfolding crisis of today. Read more