Latin America

A Bold Strategy for Cuba and Latin America

Patrick Doherty — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:17:00 -0400

[My latest entry on The Havana Note...]

The Havana Note talks a lot about the need for a new policy towards Cuba. Fifty years of failure is a shameful, bi-partisan indictment of how policy is made in Washington. Luckily, as we have been and will continue to show, more people recognize that change is on the way. But change for change's sake is foolish, and could easily backfire on the United States.

Fortunately, the emerging consensus on changing Cuba policy happens to coincide with another consensus, here in Washington, that America needs a major overhaul of all our relations with Latin America -- and with the rising influence of Hispanic voters.

But both movements lack strategic coherence.

Today I want to propose some ideas on tying these two efforts together in light of the great strategic challenges facing the United States over the next 30-40 years.

Unlike the Cold War or World War II, when ideological foes bent on global aggression defined the central strategic challenges to the United States -- and when a policy of isolation against Cuba made sense -- I argue that the central challenge facing the United States today and for decades to come is the need to create the economic space for the entrance of up to 4.5 billion people into the formal sector of the global economy.

This challenge is presented in stark relief by China. By 2030, 700 million Chinese will leave the countryside and move into the cities, entering the formal sector of the global economy. This alone is the largest rural-urban migration the planet has ever encountered and in the short term it will put incredible global stress on energy, resources, and transportation while requiring new approaches to land use that we have never encountered.

But that same narrative is happening all over the developing world.

Continue reading on the Havana Note...

What Would Nixon Do on U.S.-Cuba Relations?

Patrick Doherty — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:18:00 -0400

We hope you can join us for this event next week:

Thirty-seven years after Nixon went to China, the next President of the United States has another chance to split a non-threatening communist state away from an aggressive socialist power. Then, like now, there is an opportunity to really change the perception of the United States in the world and shift the conversation.

This event is co-hosted by the New America Foundation and The Nixon Center.

To register for this event, click here.

Start: 07/28/2008 - 12:30pm
End: 07/28/2008 - 2:00pm

New America Foundation
1630 Connecticut Ave, NW 7th Floor
Washington, 20009

Featured speakers

Dimitri K. Simes
President, The Nixon Center
Former Foreign Policy Advisor to Richard Nixon

Flynt Leverett
Senior Fellow, Director, Geopolitics of Energy Initiative, New America Foundation
Former Senior Director for Middle East Affairs, National Security Council

Julia E. Sweig
Rockefeller Senior Fellow & Director Latin America Studies
Council on Foreign Relations

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.)
Former Chief of Staff, Department of State
Pamela C. Harriman Professor, College of William & Mary

Moderator

Steve Clemons
Director New America Foundation/American Strategy Program
Publisher, www.TheWashingtonNote.com

What the Next President Should Do About Cuba

Patrick Doherty — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:30:00 -0400

Check out this post from our sister site, The Havana Note:

What the Next President Should Do About Cuba

Fifty years of what is now a failed policy is enough. It's time to get a new policy for Cuba and with it a new vision for U.S. relations with Latin America. Check out our own Col. Lawrence Wilkerson as he describes what the next President should do about Cuba.

Andres Martinez: Venezuela's Cracked Veneer

Patrick Doherty — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Writing in Canada's National Post, New America Senior Fellow Andres Martinez reports on his recent travels in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

CARACAS -- I don't like arriving in a new city early in the morning. You and the city are both still groggy, exposed; the pulse-racing anticipation of discovery is deadened by the overnight flight. It's like agreeing to go on a first date at 6 a.m. No, I'd rather make my first landing at night, when the shimmering lights only hint at what is soon to be unveiled.

Be that as it may, Amanda and I found ourselves stumbling through immigration in the Caracas airport as the city was coming to life, greeted by the massive slogan "Construyendo el Socialismo Bolivariano" ("Building Bolivarian Socialism"). The first sign that President Hugo Chavez's paradise is a slightly dysfunctional work in progress is the number of fixers that descend upon you as you emerge from customs, most of them wanting to change money. Venezuela has an official exchange rate, set by the government, in the neighbourhood of 2,000 bolivares to the dollar, a rate that is more aspirational than real. On the street, people are eager to give you between 4,000 and 6,000 bolivares to the dollar. (Following in the footsteps of plenty of other nations that have run their currencies into the ground, on the first day of 2008 Venezuela introduced the "bolivar fuerte," knocking three zeroes off the old currency.)

I didn't know this at first. In today's shrinking world, I've become rather cavalier about just showing up in a new place, finding an ATM, withdrawing the recommended "express withdrawal" amount, and figuring it out from there. Even in Cambodia last summer, that approach worked out well. But the ATMs at the Caracas airport didn't work, and the black market arbitrageurs were aggressive, and I was tired. Cono, as they say here, I needed coffee.

Playing it safe, I ended up changing dollars at a bank, which used the official rate. Doing so--it's the rate you get on your credit cards, too -- makes Venezuela an extraordinarily expensive place for foreigners; quite a rip-off, in fact. But a heavily subsidized dollar rate is a convenient way for the Chavez government to reward loyal friends and to punish those who fall out of line by regulating access to the subsidized hard currency. There are also tight controls on how much currency individuals can take out of the country.

Having grown up in Mexico, I am familiar with the melodrama of exchange controls and the corrupting nature of fictional rates. Mexico had to go this route when the country went broke in the early 1980s. But it is absurd to watch a government made ever more prosperous by surging oil revenues embrace such nonsense.

The drive from the airport to the JW Marriott in the El Rosal neighbourhood, a trip of less than 20 miles, took about two hours in traffic reminiscent of Bangkok's. Caracas is a sprawling mess of a city laid out in a beautiful valley, with shantytowns and ultra-posh neighbourhoods competing to take over the commanding heights of surrounding hillsides.

The city's core looks as though it sprouted up in five years -- the same unfortunate five years (the end of 1950s, beginning of the 1960s, say) that left so many modernist eyesores scattered around U.S. college campuses. Caracas' sprawl and dated skyscrapers were once a statement of Venezuela's self-image as a beacon of prosperity in the region, though it's sadly telling that despite all the country's oil wealth, there seems to be very little interesting new construction going up. Plenty of the country's wealth has contributed to condo building in Miami, however.

I am predisposed to like just about anywhere I travel, but I was skeptical about this place. Where to begin? Well, with Maria Elvira, I suppose. My first serious girlfriend hailed from Colombia, and I must have absorbed some of her family's cross-Andean contempt for the neighbourhood's oil-rich trust-fund kid. An Ecuadorian literature teacher in high school also used to rail against the supposed crassness of Venezuela's culture, summed up (unfairly, to be sure) by the country's obsession with beauty pageants and cosmetic surgery. She'd joke that Venezuela was so reliant on its oil wealth, so hopelessly incapable of producing anything for itself, that it even had to import toothpicks. I can recall sitting in her classroom unable to focus on One Hundred Years of Solitude, obsessing instead over images of huge Venezuela-bound container ships weighted down by millions of toothpicks.

Then there is Venezuela's sport heresy. For a soccer-crazed kid growing up in Mexico, a South American nation relatively indifferent to the world's sport and obsessed with baseball was inherently suspect. (Indeed, one of the things Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro share is a passion for el imperio's pastime -- as a teenager Chavez also aspired to play pro baseball.)

It didn't help Venezuela's cause that my hotel room wasn't ready when we arrived. When traveling, we sometimes take minor frustrations like this and ascribe blame to an entire nation. Encounter a rude waiter in Paris, and you feel free to launch into a disquisition on the French people, but encounter a rude waiter at the diner down the street from your home and, well, that guy is difficult. You don't hold it against all of America, unless, of course, you are French.

I caught a movie in the afternoon at a mall down the street from the hotel. Postales de Leningrado, a new release by director Mariana Rondon, is about the fledgling Venezuelan Marxist guerrilla movement in the 1960s. In a bit of cinematic foreshadowing, while trudging through the jungle, one of the comandantes makes a passing comment about how the hopeless movement might make more headway if they played up Simon Bolivar rather than Marx and Engels.

Chavez was on the television when we got back in the room, chatting up a leftist Colombian legislator. Chavez had managed to make himself an intermediary between Colombia's conservative government and its Marxist guerrillas, seeking to facilitate a release of hostages. I had been looking forward to catching Chavez's fabled Sunday call-in TV show, Alo, Presidente, but as I would come to discover, the man is on the tube at all hours. El comandante is a frustrated talk-show host at heart, a charismatic one at that, whose TV persona manages to exude both a sense of mischief (an underrated quality in a politician) and a disarming penchant for transparency. When someone asks him about the French position on such and such an issue, he points to his foreign minister sitting in the audience and asks him to "tell us" about his recent trip to Paris, as if the two of them hadn't yet had a chance to catch up.

Another time, I caught Chavez at a new hospital pledging to build or modernize hundreds more. He earnestly whipped out pencil and paper to make a list of all the things a great hospital needs. "Let's see," he told the assembled group of medical workers, "You need an X-ray unit with all the latest equipment, and what else, let's see "

On and on he went. It makes for seductive television, a bit like watching your Uncle Fred run the country from a reality TV show.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Cuba Diversified

Patrick Doherty — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), Co-Chair of New America's U.S.-Cuba Policy Initiative comments on the ease with which Cuba's leaders can ignore America's unilateral trade embargo. From the Havana Note:

LET'S look at what Cuba is doing with regard to diversification. It’s darned smart.

Having experienced the Soviet withdrawal from their island—a move that impacted nearly every Cuban in some way—and the concomitant epiphany of the tragic downside of sole-source support, the Cuban leadership vowed never to repeat. As a result, today that leadership is diversifying its support by state and function. Spain, China, Germany Canada, Israel, Venezuela, Brazil, and others fill the former role and nickel, tobacco, oil, rum, tourism, and other trade the latter. Cuba will never be trapped again into reliance on one state or on one or two commodities or trade functions.

The latest move in this regard was executed by the man about whom Ricardo Alarcón, President of Cuba’s National Assembly, said in 2007: “Give me ten Lula’s and I will rule the world.” I tend to agree with Alarcón, particularly when I cast Brazil’s wise leader against our own feckless leader, George W. Bush. In fact, Bush calls to mind most poignantly Shakespeare’s words, as uttered by the Fool in King Lear: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” How very apt.

Lula has just quietly visited Cuba and left a one billion dollar line of credit in his wake. Moreover, Brazil is working to assist Cuba in exploring its offshore oil potential, along with China and Venezuela (another smart form of diversification by Cuba).

The missing "state" in all of this is, of course, the United States. Its embargo looks like something from the dark ages; its policies don’t even have the rationale of “impassioned brotherhood” of a 1962 Bobby Kennedy intent on offsetting his brother’s Bay of Pigs image by eliminating Castro. In fact, there is no longer any reason for the embargo except the hardline Cuban-American lobby whose members increasingly act more like Batista clones than freedom fighters.

Moreover, as the U.S. embargo continues, our relations with all of Latin America suffer. Lately, as Brazil and Mexico in particular have recently highlighted, the U.S. is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the entire region. And as this kind of U.S. negligence usually generates in the relations of nations, other powers—such as China—are making hay while the U.S. sun refuses to shine. In short, their power is flowing into the vacuum we have purposefully and even spitefully created.

This has to cease.

Whoever is the new president in January 2009, two things need to happen with regard to Latin America and Cuba. First, Cuba, never on the front burner, needs at least to be put on the stove. Second, U.S. relations with Latin America should be completely refurbished. And there is the connection: no more effective and swifter way exists to signal a new approach to Latin America than to effect a rapprochement with Cuba as the opening gambit.

Mr./Madam President, over to you.

--Lawrence Wilkerson