That uneventful Americas Summit

April 26, 2009
Jamaica Gleaner
By Ian Boyne

The significance of the recently concluded Summit of the Americas can be judged by the amount of media attention given to that photo op Hugh Chavez had with Barack Obama and the fact that the Venezuelan radical gave him a book.

Besides that, the focus on Cuba and the absolute marginalisation of the English-speaking Caribbean countries (which I predicted) speak volumes. The summit was another public-relations triumph for United States (US) President Barack Obama who has been on a roll. The Washington-based think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, observed that a poll done before the summit revealed that Obama was the most respected and most popular leader in all of Latin America. His performance at the summit would have done nothing to erode that status.

In the face of the belligerent rant by Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, stuck in an archaic Marxist past, the unflappable US President said to laughter that “I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old”. He then declared that he was not interested in stale debates. Obama was clear about his mission at the summit: “I’m here to launch a new chapter of engagement that will be sustained throughout my administration.” Mission accomplished.

Foreign policy

Latin America has been neglected for the eight years of the Bush administration. Bush had declared Latin America a foreign policy but was derailed by September 11 and his war on terror. America has returned to giving prominence to a region whose economic significance has never waned.

Total US merchandise trade with Latin America grew by 139 per cent between 1996 and 2006, compared with 96 per cent for Asia and 95 per cent for the European Union. In 2006, the United States exported $223 billion to Latin America, compared with $55 billion to China.

A little-known fact is that Latin America is the United States’ most important source of external oil, accounting for approximately 30 per cent of imports compared with 20 per cent from the Middle East. Migration from Latin America to the United States is big issue: Latinos now account for 15 per cent of the US population and nearly 50 per cent of recent US population growth. Latino voters shape US political outcomes.

Strategic significance

So Latin America has remained important to the US. Not so the English-speaking Caribbean which has lost its strategic significance with the ending of the Cold War and, ironically, the Bush presidency. (The obsession with the “war on terror” kept some attention here for terrorists could be manufactured or harboured among us.)

The English-speaking Caribbean will have to latch on to the coat-tails of the Latin American infuentials such as Brazil, Mexico, Chile or Argentina if it wants to maintain relevance. Additionally, it has to ride the wave of multilateralism and liberal internationalism which characterises the emerging Obama doctrine.

So issues of climate change, poverty, the development agenda, international operation, security and other global issues have to be strategically used by the Caribbean to get attention, as by ourselves we pull no punch. The way the international media treated us at the summit was all the evidence we needed as to how much things have changed from the 1970s.

But the Caribbean was well represented – or over-represented – by Cuba, which was on everyone’s lips. So much so that no joint communiqué was issued as Latin American heads were disappointed that their lobbying for the ending of the Cuban embargo did not get the support they needed (among other things).

Before the summit, Obama relaxed some travel restrictions but even then, not fully. Indeed, Washington’s Council on Hemispheric Affairs dismissed those gestures as “pitifully modest and insulting to all parties”.

But in his press conference at the close of the summit, Obama made it clear that he wants some encouragement before he makes that ultimate step of lifting trade sanctions on Cuba.

“I am persuaded that it is important to send a signal to those issues of political prisoners, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democracy – that those continue to be important, that they’re not simply to be brushed aside.”

Now, unfortunately, Obama has some hard questions to answer: How come the same principled position is not adopted vis-à-vis China, Saudi Arabia and other undemocratic and repressive states with which the United States enjoys close relations? It’s the old matter of double standards all over again. Just double standards with a black face this time.

China has political prisoners; China suppresses free speech, does not tolerate a free press and persecutes political opponents under its single-party hegemonistic rule. Yet, the US has the warmest relations with China. Is it because they are not in their backyard? But what security threat does Cuba pose to the mighty United States? No more than Venezuela poses – and Venezuela ships a substantial portion of oil to the United States.

The embargo has not brought down the authoritarian regime in Cuba. It has not given the Cuban people political freedom and it has not eliminated Communist rule.

Maintaining consistency

So Obama has a challenge in maintaining consistency. That having been said, he has shown more concern for the humans rights of the Cuban people than have been shown by Latin Americana and Caribbean leaders who have over the years demonstrated an appalling and reprehensible disregard for the freedoms of the Cuban people.

Yes, US imperialism has been atrocious. Successive US administrations have maintained hostility towards Cuba. The US has been flagrant in its own disregard for democracy and freedom in the region and has an abominable history of overthrowing democratically elected regimes which did not serve its interests. All of this is true. It is also true that the communist regime in Cuba has delivered the social goods to the people, something which capitalist Latin America and the Caribbean has failed miserably to do. Nearly 200 million Latin-Americans – 37 per cent of its population – still live in poverty despite the region’s being a poster child of Washington Consensus neoliberal reforms.

Highest inequality rates

Nearly 18 million Latin Americans live legally and illegally in the US, their countries having failed to deliver on their promises. Latin America has one of the highest inequality rates in the world. “Growing wage disparity, swelling youth unemployment, weak enforcement of labour protections and persistent poverty have left some citizens disillusioned with democracy,” says the extensive report issued in September last year by the Council on Foreign Relations titled, US-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality. Homicide rates have doubled since the 1980s and the rates of violent crime are now six times higher in Latin America than the rest of the world.

Cuba doesn’t have those problems. The Cuban people have enjoyed a quality of life which has eluded people in capitalist Latin America and the Caribbean.

But, I totally reject the view that once you feed, house and take care of people’s health you don’t have to give them the right to form their own political parties, open their own newspapers and radio and television stations and propagate any religion they want as long as they are not inciting violence and criminality. It is totally unacceptable that the Cuban people don’t have social and religious freedoms, and the fact that Caricom and Latin-Americans leaders seem to have no interest in pressuring Cuba in this area makes they themselves hypocritical when they criticise the US for human-rights violations.

Undemocratic actions

How can we stand on any moral high ground to attack the US on human-rights violations and undemocratic actions when we turn a blind eye to the denial of civil liberties – a denial institutionalised in communist Cuba? Obama is absolutely right that issues of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and democracy are not to be “brushed aside”; even if he is not insisting on their exercise in China and Saudi Arabia, and even when George Bush could care less about their absence in Pakistan under military rule. There are certain principles which are inviolable and the free distribution and consumption of information – the freedom to use the Internet freely, to listen to any propaganda coming from US cable stations and to read any right-wing newspaper – these are freedoms which must not be denied the Cuban people.

Encouragingly, Raul Castro has said, the first time for any Cuban leader in 50 years, that Cuba is willing to talk about prisoners and human rights. Very significant – though the former Cuban strongman Fidel Castro said last week that Obama misunderstood his brother when he said so, leading even the left-wing and pro-Cuba Council On Hemispheric Affairs to say that “Fidel’s latest interjection follows the almost scientific pattern of Cuban authorities shooting themselves in the foot at precisely the moment that meaningful dialogue appears achievable with the US.”.

Conditions are right for the lifting of the embargo once Cuba shows a willingness to talk human rights. Though it is inconsistent, the US administration must insist that Cuba relents on its suppression of civil liberties and human rights. Economic and social rights are not enough and I wish progressives would come to acknowledge that.

The dean of the School of Public Affairs at American University, Professor William Leo Grande, says insisting on adding democracy to the agenda before lifting the embargo is a mistake. In an engaging essay in the winter 2008/2009 issue of the scholarly World Policy Journal (Engaging Cuba: A Roadmap) he says, “If we insist on explicitly adding democracy to the agenda, negotiations will go nowhere.” The Europeans don’t have that condition.

Diplomatic ties

Interestingly, a November 2008 Brookings/Florida University poll of Cuban-Americans in South Florida for the first time showed clear majorities in favour of re-establishing diplomatic ties with Cuba, and Obama won 35 per cent of Cuban-American votes, up from John Kerry’s 25 per cent. The New York Times Magazine (December 7, 2008) says Obama should “open full diplomatic relations with Cuba immediately”.

Leo Grande in World Policy Review says, “A strategic shift in our policy towards Cuba would be of tremendous symbolic value as the new administration begins the process of rebuilding the relationship with the hemisphere.” But for now, Obama says the ball is in Raul’s court.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com