United States policy toward Cuba after 1959 had a clear-cut political purpose: to destabilize and overthrow the Castro government. Faced with a working-class-based government looking to assert local control over the Cuban economy, a consensus emerged within the executive branch in support of confrontation on a bilateral and, subsequently, regional and global scale. The closure of historic ‘access points’ (military, political parties, and so forth) in the Cuban state and society during the transition to socialism made it impossible for the United States to rely on local allies and instead to concentrate on external pressures to create economic disruption, societal dislocation, and the disintegration of the Castro regime.

The Eisenhower administration's policymaking process exhibited much greater coherence and less disarray than is commonly assumed. During the early period of the Cuban Revolution, the United States was quite active in behalf of American economic interests on the Caribbean island.