Bob Buzzanco: Plaintains and Fried Rice, Dollars and Yuan: Latin America, the PRC, and the United States
[ Bob Buzzanco is a professor in the history department at the University of Houston. ]
The ghost in the room, Cuba, was the most important topic when President Barack Obama, in his opening remarks at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, offered a “new beginning” with Havana. The specifics at this point are not huge: family travel, remittances, perhaps Cuban membership in the OAS, but Obama has shown, unlike his predecessor, that at least he has a grip on reality.
The Obamamaniacs are praising him as a great statesman for these moves toward Cuba while the right-wing is probably preparing another teabag [or café con leche] assault on Washington as we speak, but Obama’s shift on Cuba was neither a bold move or appeasement, but principally a recognition that the world, and Latin America more than most places, had changed dramatically and the United States had little choice to but to accept that. Much like FDR exchanging diplomatic recognition with the Soviet Union in 1933, Obama’s moves toward Havana come after a long, a too long, period of estrangement, and take place during a period of crisis when it’s easier to get away with a “grand gesture” of this sort. But, make no mistake, Obama is not acting from a position of strength, but, as he would know from his poker days, is trying to pass off two pair as a flush.
There are two factors that made Obama’s overtures possible, if not necessary.
*****
The first is the emergence of the Latin Left. I would argue that there has never been a region as Left in its overall political orientation as Latin America is today. As someone who grew up in some of the most divisive days of the Cold War, the rise of Left governments in Latin America stuns me. I grew up listening to the most harsh invective against the Cuban Revolution; came of age politically when the Carter and Reagan administrations began to wage brutal counterrevolution against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and fund equally brutal governments and paramilitaries in Central America [and, as I was living in the Washington D.C. area at the time, I recall spending many Friday afternoons outside contra headquarters- I want to say on Wisconsin Avenue near Adams Morgan?- protesting against the vile Reagan policies]; and, as a Ph.D. student, I learned about the interventions at the turn-of-the-century, the “money doctors,” the ousters of Arbenz and Allende, the 1968 Olympics massacre, and . . . .well, you get the point. Whenever the forces of nationalism or democracy tried to rise up in Latin America the U.S. government-Democrat and Republican alike-was there to offer military aid, civil police, training at the School of the Assassins, and virtually any other measure to deny self-determination and maintain ghoulish military proxies in power.
How the world has changed:
Just about a month ago, Mauricio Funes, a former FMLN rebel, was elected president in El Salvador.
In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinistas brutally attacked and in reality overthrown by the U.S., has come back as the elected president [just as he was defeated in an election and walked away from office in 1990], making “compromises” to be sure but still firmly to the left.
Fernando Armindo Lugo Méndez, is the current President of Paraguay and a former Roman Catholic bishop of the Diocese of San Pedro where he ran afoul of the Vatican for his liberation theology ideology and activities.
In Peru, Alan Garcia, a rising Left star in the 1980s, came back into power a few years ago, more “tame” than before but still far more “radical” than anything the U.S. would have tolerated a couple generations earlier.
Uruguay has its first left-wing president now, Tabare Vazquez.
In Ecuador a “humanist and Christian of the left,” Rafael Correa, was elected president and last year he repudiated Ecuador’s “immoral” national debt.
Argentina’s president, Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner, is an unabashed Left populist with close ties to the Venezuelan and Cuban governments.
In Chile, the daughter of an Allende government official murdered after the Pinochet coup who was, along with her mother, was tortured by the government, is now president: Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria.
Guatemala, almost certainly the most brutal state in the 1970s and 1980s, in 2008 elected Álvaro Colom Caballeros, a social democrat and nephew of a former mayor of Guatemala City killed by government death squads in 1979. The vice-president there is a progressive heart surgeon from Houston.
In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, aka “Lula,” is serving his second term as president. He represents the Workers’ Party and is a former union leader himself.
And then there are the “Big Three” of the Left, about which much is known and not much needs to be added.
Evo Morales has been the president of Bolivia since 2006. He heads the “Movement for Socialism,” and was the leader of the Coca Growers’ Movement, as well as the first indigenous president in Bolivian history.
With his brother’s health problems forcing him to step aside, Raul Castro is now the president of Cuba, which this year celebrated its 50th anniversary of liberation from the U.S.-Sponsored Batista regime. Recently, Raul has made several overtures to the U.S. and he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have exchanged reasonably positive messages.
And, finally, there is Hugo Chavez. Maligned in the press as “crazy” and “dictatorial,” Chavez, it must be pointed out, has won at least a half-dozen elections and had a far more claim to political legitimacy than George W. Bush ever did. And Chavez, sitting on heavy oil reserves, has been able to develop global relationships unlike any other Latin country, although the recent economic downturn will no doubt have a serious adverse impact on the economy in Caracas....
Read entire article at SHAFR
The ghost in the room, Cuba, was the most important topic when President Barack Obama, in his opening remarks at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, offered a “new beginning” with Havana. The specifics at this point are not huge: family travel, remittances, perhaps Cuban membership in the OAS, but Obama has shown, unlike his predecessor, that at least he has a grip on reality.
The Obamamaniacs are praising him as a great statesman for these moves toward Cuba while the right-wing is probably preparing another teabag [or café con leche] assault on Washington as we speak, but Obama’s shift on Cuba was neither a bold move or appeasement, but principally a recognition that the world, and Latin America more than most places, had changed dramatically and the United States had little choice to but to accept that. Much like FDR exchanging diplomatic recognition with the Soviet Union in 1933, Obama’s moves toward Havana come after a long, a too long, period of estrangement, and take place during a period of crisis when it’s easier to get away with a “grand gesture” of this sort. But, make no mistake, Obama is not acting from a position of strength, but, as he would know from his poker days, is trying to pass off two pair as a flush.
There are two factors that made Obama’s overtures possible, if not necessary.
*****
The first is the emergence of the Latin Left. I would argue that there has never been a region as Left in its overall political orientation as Latin America is today. As someone who grew up in some of the most divisive days of the Cold War, the rise of Left governments in Latin America stuns me. I grew up listening to the most harsh invective against the Cuban Revolution; came of age politically when the Carter and Reagan administrations began to wage brutal counterrevolution against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and fund equally brutal governments and paramilitaries in Central America [and, as I was living in the Washington D.C. area at the time, I recall spending many Friday afternoons outside contra headquarters- I want to say on Wisconsin Avenue near Adams Morgan?- protesting against the vile Reagan policies]; and, as a Ph.D. student, I learned about the interventions at the turn-of-the-century, the “money doctors,” the ousters of Arbenz and Allende, the 1968 Olympics massacre, and . . . .well, you get the point. Whenever the forces of nationalism or democracy tried to rise up in Latin America the U.S. government-Democrat and Republican alike-was there to offer military aid, civil police, training at the School of the Assassins, and virtually any other measure to deny self-determination and maintain ghoulish military proxies in power.
How the world has changed:
Just about a month ago, Mauricio Funes, a former FMLN rebel, was elected president in El Salvador.
In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinistas brutally attacked and in reality overthrown by the U.S., has come back as the elected president [just as he was defeated in an election and walked away from office in 1990], making “compromises” to be sure but still firmly to the left.
Fernando Armindo Lugo Méndez, is the current President of Paraguay and a former Roman Catholic bishop of the Diocese of San Pedro where he ran afoul of the Vatican for his liberation theology ideology and activities.
In Peru, Alan Garcia, a rising Left star in the 1980s, came back into power a few years ago, more “tame” than before but still far more “radical” than anything the U.S. would have tolerated a couple generations earlier.
Uruguay has its first left-wing president now, Tabare Vazquez.
In Ecuador a “humanist and Christian of the left,” Rafael Correa, was elected president and last year he repudiated Ecuador’s “immoral” national debt.
Argentina’s president, Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner, is an unabashed Left populist with close ties to the Venezuelan and Cuban governments.
In Chile, the daughter of an Allende government official murdered after the Pinochet coup who was, along with her mother, was tortured by the government, is now president: Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria.
Guatemala, almost certainly the most brutal state in the 1970s and 1980s, in 2008 elected Álvaro Colom Caballeros, a social democrat and nephew of a former mayor of Guatemala City killed by government death squads in 1979. The vice-president there is a progressive heart surgeon from Houston.
In Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, aka “Lula,” is serving his second term as president. He represents the Workers’ Party and is a former union leader himself.
And then there are the “Big Three” of the Left, about which much is known and not much needs to be added.
Evo Morales has been the president of Bolivia since 2006. He heads the “Movement for Socialism,” and was the leader of the Coca Growers’ Movement, as well as the first indigenous president in Bolivian history.
With his brother’s health problems forcing him to step aside, Raul Castro is now the president of Cuba, which this year celebrated its 50th anniversary of liberation from the U.S.-Sponsored Batista regime. Recently, Raul has made several overtures to the U.S. and he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have exchanged reasonably positive messages.
And, finally, there is Hugo Chavez. Maligned in the press as “crazy” and “dictatorial,” Chavez, it must be pointed out, has won at least a half-dozen elections and had a far more claim to political legitimacy than George W. Bush ever did. And Chavez, sitting on heavy oil reserves, has been able to develop global relationships unlike any other Latin country, although the recent economic downturn will no doubt have a serious adverse impact on the economy in Caracas....