OPINION:
COMMENTARY:
At a small dinner in a downtown restaurant just before Easter, we were discussing where our country was going, when a friend who has served for years in Republican administrations suddenly began speaking about the one area of the world that nobody pays any attention to.
“Well,” he said, “I actually have always felt that our main attention should be directed to Latin America. Our power should be asserted regionally first, not internationally. The Monroe Doctrine perhaps updated?”
Everyone at the table looked at him in a kind of stunned, even stupefied, silence. Latin America? Heck, no! For at least the past 40 years, we have found our “diversions” in faraway places like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Somalia, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. We could really get interested only in countries we didn’t know anything about. No matter that we had no history in common with them - we were amusing ourselves (and, like many “amusements,” ours turned out to be mighty expensive).
The Monroe Doctrine? Oh yes, it was President James Monroe who, in 1823, declared the Western Hemisphere “out of bounds” to European colonization and effectively proclaimed Latin and Central America to be the United States’ primary area of influence. Could our friend bringing up such passe ideas at the dinner possibly be serious?
Not only was he serious, but he also made me think.
The Obama administration was preparing for the newest Summit of the Americas, the fifth actually. This three-day conference, held in Trinidad and Tobago, ends Sunday.
It’s not as if these meetings were assured even of the polite do-nothingness that accrued to many of the older hemispheric meetings. The last meeting of 34 democratic heads of government, in Mar del Plata, Argentina, during former President George W. Bush’s ever-tottering administration in 2005, devolved into violent anti-American demonstrations for days and days, with Venezuela’s pouty leftist Hugo Chavez leading the pack - and not much else.
Curiously enough, in the upsweep to the current summit, the attention was not on any of those 34 heads of state that Washington so loves to point to as proof of the democratization of the hemisphere, but on (where else?) the Castro brothers’ own Cuba. Jeffrey Davidow, our former ambassador to Mexico and one of our best Latin Americanists, said of that peculiarly important isle at a meeting last week: “Let’s keep in mind that it is something larger than itself. It is in a way a memory of that which existed and a caution of what may exist in the future.”
Indeed, Mr. Obama had already made clear that he will lift long-standing U.S. restrictions on Cuba, allowing some 1.5 million Cuban-Americans to visit family members there as often as they like and to send them unlimited funds. Indiana’s respected Republican Sen. Richard G. Lugar is already pushing for the end to the 47-year-old economic embargo against Cuba and has called upon the president to appoint a “special envoy” to initiate direct talks with the island’s communist government. Thus, the discussion begins.
The perfervidly anti-Castro side here insists that we must make no changes in policy at all, that American visitors to Cuba will only provide the Castro brothers another breath of fresh air when they should be choking and coughing up their own horrendous mistakes. The former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba, Ambassador James Cason, writes in a personal blog: “Flooding Cuba with tourists doesn’t spread democracy because authorities there strictly limit and harshly penalize interactions between ordinary Cubans and foreigners.”
But I have to disagree. Once before, in the late ’70s, Fidel Castro made one of his few terrible mistakes. Arrogantly and errantly, he “opened up,” allowing exiled Cuban family members to return after some years of absence. The results - for him - were disastrous. For the first time, Cuba’s “generation of the revolution” saw the outside world, and he faced a real counterrevolution. Not surprisingly, he immediately cut back.
So, yes, open up to tourism, but realize that such an opening will indeed bring the Castro homeboys up to $1 billion in tourist monies. That’s OK: You pay the price because it’s worth it in terms of opening Cubans’ eyes and minds.
Direct trade with Cuba is a different proposition because the Castro brothers “give” workers to foreign businesses, who pay the Castros in foreign currency, while they pay the workers a pittance in worthless pesos. I don’t want to see our companies involved in such shameless practices; Mr. Castro is cleverer than they, and he would get them in way over their moral heads.
So we have here two parts of the same question. We have the bigger question of Latin and Central America at the summit, and we have the supposedly smaller question of “little” Cuba, which always, paradoxically, looms larger.
As to the first question, after nearly three administrations of flagrant neglect by Washington, Latin America has splintered ideologically and politically. We now have the “leftist” trajectory, which spreads from Mr. Chavez’s Venezuela, to the resurgent Incas of Bolivia and Ecuador. On the other hand, liberalized Brazil is coming to the fore, Chile and Costa Rica are thriving and El Salvador has extraordinarily elected a president from the old Marxist guerrilla faction.
There has not been much to be done at this summit except what Mr. Obama does so well - treat everyone with respect and try to gradually return the hemisphere to the mutually respectful relations that reached their zenith with John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s.
As for Cuba, keep cool. Nothing will change - at all - until Fidel Castro dies, and perhaps not even then. We have too much historic baggage there to force any real changes at this point, which, if we had any sense, would be a kind of relief.
Georgie Anne Geyer is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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