Glenn Garvin, The Herald's television critic, has also reported from Nicaragua for the paper. His books include Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras (Brassey's, 1992). He asked this of Daniel P. Erikson, a senior associate for U.S. policy at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington who has written The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, The United States and the Next Revolution (Bloomsbury Press, $28):

Question: In The Cuba Wars, you're strongly critical of the U.S. embargo on the island, writing that there's ''more than 40 years of evidence suggesting that U.S. efforts to isolate Cuba had, if anything, helped the Castro regime to stay in power.'' If economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation don't work, did we make a mistake in employing them them against, say, Guatemala's military government of the 1970s, or South Africa's apartheid regime? Why do so many critics of the embargo on Cuba think that sanctions were warranted in those cases?

Answer: While economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation can sometimes prompt authoritarian regimes to modify their behavior, in other cases they merely reinforce the control that a government has over its people.

Cuba clearly falls into the latter category, and we have nearly 50 years of data to prove it. Last February, after 49 years in power, Fidel Castro implemented a smooth handover to his brother Raúl while the U.S. was left so tangled up in its decades-old embargo policy that it could only sit on the sidelines and watch.

In a perfect world, the U.S. would be able to wave a magic wand at Cuba to transform the island into the prosperous, democratic, and pro-U.S. country that is presumably the goal of our foreign policy. Indeed, much of U.S. policy has been based on hoping for a ''poof moment,'' where the Castro government vanishes in a cloud of smoke and a democracy takes its place. Instead, not only has the U.S. embargo failed to dislodge the Cuban government, but it appears to have enhanced its staying power, which means that the next U.S. president will be the 11th to find a Castro at the helm of Cuba.

• 2 p.m. Sunday, Room 7174-5

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