The transformation process in the foreign policy guidelines of the United States of America and Cuba during the governments of Barack Obama and Raúl Castro

• Grant number: 20/05835-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): December 01, 2020
• Effective date (End): February 28, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - International Politics
• Principal Investigator: Cristina Soreanu Pecequilo
• Grantee: Stella Bonifácio da Silva Azeredo
• Host Institution: Instituto de Políticas Públicas e Relações Internacionais (IPPRI). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In 2014, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro officially announced that they would begin the process of re-establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, after years of isolation due to the context of the Cold War (1947/1989). The bilateral break that took place in 1961, the economic embargo and subsequent strangulation measures, are related to the events of the Cuban Revolution (1959), when the island broke traditional historical ties with the Americans and installed, with Fidel Castro, a socialist regime supported by the Soviet Union. Even with the end of the Cold War in 1989, diplomatic normalization only officially began in 2014 (although without changing completely the structure of bilateral relations, due to the maintenance of the economic embargo). Therefore, the broad objective of this project is to analyze the changes in the foreign policy orientation of the United States and Cuba, from 2009 to 2014, that led to the bilateral rapprochement, discursive changes, and the implementation of cooperation agreements. The specific objective involves the identification of the political, economic and social sources (domestic and international) that contributed to lead to these changes. Furthermore, it seeks to observe the levels of these changes and to explore the impact of these new fundamentals in the conduction of the normalization. This project is grounded in the area of Foreign Policy Analysis, more specifically, inside the Foreign Policy Change literature. The analytical model that will be employed combines, in an adapted way, some ideas present in the causal dynamics presented by Jakob Gustavsson and Charles Hermann, that are used to examine changes in foreign policy. This model is based on the checklist model, which provides tools for the development of empirical studies through induction. To this end, qualitative work will be carried out with primary and secondary sources to address the independent variables (political and economic sources, internal and external), according to the specific objective of identifying the factors that led to the change. As for the dependent variable (the foreign policy change), in order to verify in which level this theme fits, a quantitative work with official pronouncements will be accomplished. For this, the software Voyant-Tools, will be used because it expands the analytical capacity, allowing the handling of a large volume of data. This analysis seeks to identify the terms of this change in the guidelines of the external policies of Cuba and the USA, taking into account the evolution in the perception that each side had about the political and economic agendas of the other country, as well as the approach put in place to deal with their differences. After inserting the documents in this software, it will be observed, with its tools, the frequency and pattern of certain terms previously stablished as well as the context (the way they appear throughout the text). Then, these collected data will be placed in a table in order to observe the evolution of these issues over different governments. They will provide empirical data on the evolution of the situation of this bilateral relationship, the degree of change in these foreign policies that allowed the normalization to continue. (AU)

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

AZEREDO, Stella Bonifácio da Silva. The transformation process in the foreign policy guidelines of the United States of America and of Cuba during the governments of Barack Obama and of Raúl Castro. 2022. Master's Dissertation - Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Instituto de Políticas Públicas e Relações Internacionais. São Paulo São Paulo.