Harry Targ : From the Bay of Pigs to the Missile Crisis / 3

Front page of New York Daily News, October 23, 1962. From the Mitchell Archives.
The Cuba story, Part 3:
The Bay of Pigs to the missile crisis

The Cuban missile crisis suggests that the United States would go to any extreme, even nuclear war, to defend the interests of capitalism.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / October 17, 2012

"In the missile crisis the Kennedys played their dangerous game skillfully... But all their skill would have been to no avail if in the end Khrushchev had preferred his prestige, as they preferred theirs, to the danger of a world war. In this respect we are all indebted to Khrushchev." (I.F. Stone,“What If Khrushchev Hadn’t Backed Down?” in In a Time of Torment, Vintage, 1967)

[Part three of three.]

The Kennedy Administration goes to the brink of nuclear war

The period between the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the announcement of the Alliance for Progress economic assistance program, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was one of escalating hostilities. Fidel Castro declared Cuba a Socialist state. The United States pressured members of the Organization of American States (OAS) to expel Cuba.

The CIA began campaigns to assassinate the Cuban leader and President Kennedy initiated the complete economic blockade that exists until today. In addition, Castro warned that the U.S. was continuing to plan for another invasion. The Soviet Union began providing more economic and military support to the Cubans, including anti-aircraft missiles and jet aircraft.

In October 1962, U.S. spy planes sighted the construction of Soviet surface-to-air missile installations and the presence of Soviet medium-range bombers on Cuban soil. These sightings were made after Republican leaders had begun to attack Kennedy for allowing a Soviet military presence on the island. Kennedy had warned the Soviets in September not to install “offensive” military capabilities in Cuba. Photos indicated that the Soviets had also begun to build ground-to-ground missile installations on the island, which Kennedy defined as “offensive” and a threat to national security.

After securing the photographs Kennedy assembled a special team of advisors, known as EXCOM, to discuss various responses the United States might make. He excluded any strategy that prioritized taking the issue to the United Nations for resolution.

After much deliberation EXCOM focused on two policy responses: a strategic air strike against Soviet targets in Cuba or a blockade of incoming Soviet ships coupled with threats of further action if the Soviet missiles were not withdrawn. Both options had a high probability of escalating to nuclear war if the Soviet Union refused to back down.

High drama, much of it televised, followed the initiation of a naval blockade of Soviet ships heading across the Atlantic to Cuba. Fortunately, the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, sent notes to the President that led to a tacit agreement between the two leaders whereby Soviet missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba and the United States would promise not to invade Cuba to overthrow the Castro government. In addition, the President indicated that obsolete U.S. missiles in Turkey would be disassembled over time.

Most scholars argue that the missile crisis constituted Kennedy’s finest hour as statesman and diplomat. They agree with the administration view that the missiles constituted a threat to U.S. security, despite Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s claim in EXCOM meetings that the missiles did not change the strategic balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Most of these scholars have agreed that the symbolic value of the installation of Soviet missiles could have had grave consequences for U.S. “credibility.”

Given the importance of the missiles, leading social scientists have written that the Kennedy team carefully considered a multitude of policy responses. EXCOM did not ignore competing analyses, as had been done in the decisional process prior to the Bay of Pigs. The blockade policy that was adopted, experts believe, constituted a rational application of force that it was hoped would lead to de-escalation of tensions. All observers agreed that the United States and the Soviet Union had gone to the brink of nuclear war. Even the President estimated that there was a 50 percent probability of full-scale nuclear war.

In the end the Soviets withdrew their missiles. Analysts said the Soviet Union suffered a propaganda defeat for putting the missiles on Cuban soil in the first place and then withdrawing them after U.S. threats. Khrushchev was criticized by the Chinese government and within a year he was ousted from leadership in the Soviet Union.

In the light of this U.S. “victory,” Kennedy has been defined as courageous and rational. The real meaning of the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, is different, even 50 years after the event. The crisis actually suggests that the United States quest to maintain and enhance its empire would lead it to go to any extreme, even nuclear war, to defend the interests of capitalism. To avoid serious losses, whether symbolic or material, for capitalism, any policy was justified.

Further, in terms of U.S. politics, Kennedy was calculating the effects of the missiles on the chances for his party to retain control of Congress in 1962. A second “defeat” over Cuba (the Bay of Pigs was the first) would have heightened the opposition’s criticisms of his foreign policy.

Finally, in personal terms, Kennedy was driven by the need to establish a public image as courageous and powerful in confronting the Soviets. Khrushchev had spoken harshly to him at a summit meeting in Vienna in 1961 and Castro had been victorious at the Bay of Pigs. The President’s own “credibility” had been damaged and a show of force in October 1962, was necessary for his career.

Because of imperialism, politics, and personal political fortunes, the world almost went to nuclear war 50 years ago. As I.F. Stone suggested shortly after the crisis, nuclear war was avoided because the Soviet Union chose to withdraw from the tense conflict rather than to engage in it further.

National Security Archives files referred to in an earlier blog suggest, "the historical record shows that the decisions leading to the crisis which almost brought nuclear war have been repeated over and over again since the early 1960s." The danger of the unabashed and irresponsible use of force and the legitimation of the idea that diplomacy can be conducted using nuclear weapons and other devastating weapons systems still represents a threat to human survival.

This is the third of three articles that address U.S./Cuban relations that culminated in a crisis over Cuba that almost led to nuclear war. These essays are adapted from my book, Strategy of an Empire in Decline: Cold War II, 1986.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his book from Changemaker Press which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : From the Bay of Pigs to the Missile Crisis / 2

John F. Kennedy and Rómulo Betancourt at Alliance for Progress meeting in La Morita, Venezuela, Dec. 16, 1961. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The Cuba story, Part 2:
The Bay of Pigs to the missile crisis

The Castros of this world, the Kennedy Administration believed (as has every administration since), had to be crushed at all costs.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / October 9, 2012

"I have called on all the people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress -- Alianza para Progreso -- a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools -- techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela...

"To achieve this goal political freedom must accompany material progress. Our Alliance for Progress is an alliance of free governments-and it must work to eliminate tyranny from a hemisphere in which it has no rightful place. Therefore let us express our special friendship to the people of Cuba and the Dominican Republic-and the hope they will soon rejoin the society of free men, uniting with us in our common effort." (Address by President Kennedy at a White House reception for Latin American diplomats and members of Congress, March 13, 1961)

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." (Address by President Kennedy to diplomats one year after his Alliance for Progress speech. March 13, 1962)

[Part two of three.]

The Alliance for Progress as a “non-Communist” path to development 

The Kennedy Administration initiated a policy of foreign assistance in Latin America to complement the United States’ historic use of military force in the region. The President’s economic program was announced in the aftermath of long-standing complaints from Latin American dictators and some elected leaders that the United States had supported European recovery, the celebrated Marshall Plan of the 1940s, but ignored the Western Hemisphere.

Most importantly, the Kennedy Administration and anti-Communist friends in the Hemisphere became increasingly concerned about the enthusiasm the Cuban revolution was generating in the region.

In the midst of what was presented to the public as the “threat of Communism” in Latin America, Kennedy presented his “Alliance for Progress” aid package to diplomats and Congressmen on March 3, 1961 (about one month before JFK authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion).

The Alliance, the President promised, would provide public and private assistance equivalent to $20 billion to Latin American countries over a 10-year period. The plan projected annual growth rates in Latin America of 2.5 percent and would lead to the alleviation of malnutrition, poor housing and health, single-crop economies, and iniquitous landholding patterns (all campaigns underway in revolutionary Cuba).

Loans were contingent upon the recipient governments, and their political and economic elites, carrying out basic land reform, establishing progressive taxation, creating social welfare programs, and expanding citizenship and opportunities for political participation.

However, the effect of the Alliance, even before Kennedy’s death, was negative. Problems of poverty, declining growth rates, inflation, lower prices for export commodities, and the maintenance of autocratic and corrupt governments persisted. The reality of the Alliance and most other aid programs was that they were predicated on stabilizing those corrupt ruling classes that had been the source of underdevelopment in the first place.

The connections between the Alliance program and the interests of United States capital were clear. For example, a section of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1962 authorized the president to cut off aid to any nation that nationalized or placed “excessive” taxes on U.S. corporations or which terminated contacts with U.S. firms.

The act also emphasized monetary stability and the kinds of austerity programs common to U.S. and International Monetary Fund aid, requiring nations receiving aid to reduce public services and to maintain low wage rates to entice foreign investment.

Further, Alliance funds were often to be used to serve the interests of foreign capital; for example building roads, harbors, and transportation facilities to speed up the movement of locally-produced but foreign-owned goods to international markets.

Finally, the symbolism of the Alliance proclamation by President Kennedy was designed to promote the idea that U.S. resources, in collaboration with reformism in Latin America, would create societies that met the needs of the people and encouraged their political participation. The Alliance was presented as a response to Fidel Castro, a “non-Communist manifesto”for development.

The record of poverty and military rule throughout the Hemisphere suggested that there was no correspondence between symbol and reality. Kennedy, in a moment of unusual frankness, was reported to have said that the United States preferred liberal regimes in Latin America, but if they could not be maintained, it would much prefer a right-wing dictatorship to a leftist regime.

After Kennedy’s death, Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs in the Johnson Administration, told reporters that U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere was not about economic development or democratization, but fighting Communism and protecting U.S. economic interests.

In reality, the frankness about the motivations behind U.S. policy expressed by Kennedy after the Alliance speech and Thomas Mann after Kennedy’s death clearly showed that the bottom line in terms of U.S. policy remained support for international capital.

The Castros of this world, the Kennedy Administration believed (as has every administration since), had to be crushed at all costs. What remained significant over the next 60 years was that the Cuban revolution could not be defeated.

As the next essay in this series suggests, the Kennedy Administration, having failed to overthrow Cuban socialism at the Bay of Pigs, nor diminish its luster in the region through the economic bribery of the Alliance for Progress program, was willing to go to the brink of nuclear war, the Cuban Missile crisis, to combat socialism in the Western Hemisphere.

This essay is the second of three articles that address U.S./Cuban relations that culminated in a crisis over Cuba that almost led to nuclear war. These essays are adapted from my book, Strategy of an Empire in Decline: Cold War II, 1986.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his book from Changemaker Press which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : The Ideology of U.S. Hegemony in the Hemisphere

Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge articulated what was to become the new ideology of American empire. Image from the Library of Congress.
The ideological dimension:
U.S. Hegemony in the Western Hemisphere

In relations with Latin America, and particularly Cuba, policy has been built upon economic interest, geopolitics, and ideology.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2012

[The following article by Harry Targ is adapted from a presentation to be given at a conference co-sponsored by the Radical Philosophy Association and the University of Havana in Cuba between June 18 and 22. Revisiting the remarks of key foreign policy elites from the 1890s until now suggests the commonality of outlook that pervades how the United States views the Global South and particularly Cuba. Ironically not much has changed in that outlook.]

U.S. policymakers believe and/or propagate various illusions or rationales for United States foreign policy that become part of common political discourse. In relations with Latin America, and particularly Cuba, policy has been built upon economic interest, geopolitics, and ideology.

The ideological discourse justifying U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Its modern exposition is surprisingly similar to significant declarations by foreign policy elites during the era of the Cuban war against Spanish colonialism.

For example, shortly after the U.S. victory in the Spanish/Cuban/American war, Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge articulated what was to become the new ideology of American empire linking economics to Godly purpose:

"We will establish trading posts throughout the world as distributing points for American products... Great colonies, governing themselves, flying our flag and trading with us, will grow about our posts of trade, And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted.” (in Greg Jones, Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream, 2012, 93)

In a campaign speech in Indianapolis, Beveridge articulated a spiritual call and rationale for a global policy that transcended mere economic gain. America’s destiny required the U.S. “...to set the world its example of right and honor…We cannot retreat from any soil where providence has unfurled our banner. It is ours to save that soil, for liberty, and civilization" (in Jones, 96). And speaking before the Senate justifying the colonization of the Philippines he proclaimed a U.S. mission that transcended politics:

"It is elemental... it is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth." (Congressional Record, 56 Congress, I Session, pp.704-712)

Within a few years of the U.S. colonization of Cuba and the Philippines, President Theodore Roosevelt elaborated on the U.S. world mission. He spoke of the necessity of promoting peace and justice in the world: a project that required adequate military capabilities both for “securing respect for itself and of doing good to others.”

To those who claim that the United States seeks material advantage in its activist policy toward the countries of the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt responded that such claims were untrue. The U.S., he said, is motivated by altruism: “All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship.”

Cuba was an example, he said:

"If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt Amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all questions of interference by the Nation with their affairs would be at an end."

He assured Latin Americans in this address to Congress in 1904 that if “...they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort...” (“Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” President’s Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1904).

During a presentation in Norway in 1910 Roosevelt praised the U.S. for leaving Cuba as promised after the war to return only temporarily because of ...a disaster…a revolution” such that “...we were obliged to land troops again.”

The President proudly declared that:

"And before I left the Presidency Cuba resumed its career as a separate republic, holding its head erect as a sovereign state among the other nations of the earth. All that our people want is just exactly what the Cuban people themselves want -- that is, a continuance of order within the island, and peace and prosperity, so that there shall be no shadow of an excuse for any outside intervention.” (“The Colonial Policy of the United States,” an Address Delivered at Christiania, Norway, May 5, 1910)

Earlier on January 18, 1909, to the Methodist Episcopal Church (“The Expansion of the White Races”) throughout the world. The indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere have been assimilated with their “intruders” with the end result “that the Indian population of America is larger today than it was when Columbus discovered the continent, and stands on a far higher plane of happiness and efficiency.”

And to highlight the missionary message Roosevelt added:

"Of course the best that can happen to any people that has not already a high civilization of its own is to assimilate and profit by American or European ideas, the ideas of civilization and Christianity, without submitting to alien control; but such control, in spite of all its defects, is in a very large number of cases the prerequisite condition to the moral and material advance of the peoples who dwell in the darker corners of the earth."

Before the reader dismisses these simplistic, racist statements, it is useful to examine more recent proclamations of the motivations for United States foreign policy, particularly toward Latin America. It is worth remembering that recent U.S. presidents, including Barack Obama, quote favorably from the words of Theodore Roosevelt on various subjects.

For example, in March, 1961, and clearly as a response to the Cuban revolution, President John Kennedy announced the creation of a new “Alliance for Progress” in Latin America, “a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work, and land, health and schools.”

The Alliance was to be a 10-year program of social and economic development that would transform the hemisphere “into an historic decade of democratic progress.” Representatives of participating countries would prepare plans for their own development that would “establish targets and priorities, insure monetary stability, establish the machinery for vital social change, stimulate private activity and initiative, and provide for a maximum national effort.”

JFK promised U.S financial contributions to stimulate economic reform and in the end transform “the fragmentation of Latin American economies.” The variety of programs -- education, land reform, tax reform -- would rebuild the region.

The United States also pledged its assistance to those countries whose independence might be threatened. And, of course, the President proclaimed that the United States supports an alliance of free governments and will work to eliminate “tyranny." JFK expressed “our special friendship to the people of Cuba and the Dominican Republic and the hope they will soon rejoin the society of free men...”

Sixty years after the proclamations of Teddy Roosevelt the United States remained committed to offer the blessings of freedom and democracy to the peoples of Cuba. (President John F. Kennedy, “Preliminary Formulations of the Alliance for Progress,” March 13, 1961)

Twenty-two years later President Reagan again underscored the U.S. presumption of its special role in the Hemisphere, restating the U.S. role more in the language of Roosevelt than the subtler Kennedy. The speech was presented at a gathering of Cuban-Americans. Reagan praised assembled Cuban-Americans, such as Jorge Mas Canosa, who came to the United States motivated by a passion for liberty.

Reagan spoke of descendants of pioneers and emigrants from various locales who started “fresh” in the “New World”; people who “share the same fundamental values of God, family, work, freedom, democracy, and justice.” (“Perhaps the greatest tie between us can be seen in the incredible number of cathedrals and churches found throughout the hemisphere. Our forefathers took the worship of God seriously.”)

Reagan then warned of the “new colonialism that threatens the Americas.” This, of course, was represented by the revolutionary government of Nicaragua, the revolutionaries fighting against dictatorship in El Salvador, and the enduring threat to freedom, Cuba.

In the latter, the independent labor movement was destroyed in 1959, churches suppressed, all free speech eliminated, and young Cubans sent to faraway places to defend unpopular regimes. And remembering the sacrifices of the United States in the Cuban war against Spanish colonialism, Reagan regretted that “Cuba is no longer independent.” He promised that “we will not let this same fate befall others in the hemisphere...”

After endorsing 1980s policies such as the Caribbean Basin Initiative and Radio Marti President Reagan reminded his audience of the perpetual burden Americans face in defending freedom. He quoted Teddy Roosevelt: "We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.”

And Reagan ended: “finally, let us pledge ourselves to meet this sacred responsibility. And let us pledge ourselves to the freedom of the noble, long suffering, Cuban people.” (“Text of President Reagan’s Speech on Threat to Latin America, New York Time, May 21, 1983)

President Obama’s opening remarks at the Summit of the Americas (April 14, 2012) were different in tone than those cited above. He celebrated economic development in the region, encouraged continued economic globalization, praised the growth of Latin American nations such as Brazil and Colombia proving that “a lot of the old arguments on the left and the right no longer apply.”

The challenge for the future, he said, was to continue distributing the benefits of globalization to more and more people and “giving businesses opportunities to thrive and create new products and new services and enjoy the global marketplace.”

The President called on the Hemisphere nations to continue training people to compete in the global economy, stimulate trade, establish more mutually beneficial trade agreements like the one he signed with the President of Colombia, become more energy efficient, and promote education.

He concluded with some of the more traditional presidential language, albeit in less than messianic terms, about core principles of governance: “democracy and rule of law, human rights being observed, freedom of expression.” In addition, he mentioned “personal security, the capacity for people to feel as if they work hard then they’re able to achieve, and they have motivation to start a business and to know that their own work will pay off.”

President Obama emphasized the connections between “clean, transparent open government that is working on behalf of its people.” These features, he said, were important for business.

“The days when a business feels good working in a place where people are being oppressed -- ultimately that’s an unstable environment for you to do business. You do business well when you know that it’s a well-functioning society and that there’s a legitimate government in place that is going to be looking out for its people.”

With that said, Obama praised both the governments of Colombia and Brazil.

The Obama comments at the opening Summit of the Americas in 2012, more paralleling the language of President Kennedy’s Alliance speech than the missionary statements of Beveridge, Roosevelt, and Reagan, still suggest that the United States, and some Latin American political and economic elites, reflect the interests and values of the masses of Latin America’s citizens.

All the speeches offer a common standard to judge what is best for the vast majorities of the peoples of the Hemisphere; whether the region is moving toward or away from God, Democracy (defined in very selective ways), and Markets. And, whether stated or implied, the polar opposite of this standard is most starkly represented by the Cuban revolution.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Diplomatic Rejection at Cartagena Summit Reflects U.S. Decline

Is U.S. image fading? President Obama on giant screen at Americas Summit in Cartagena, April 14, 2012. Photo by John Vizcaino / Reuters.
Occupy Latin America:
Changing relations in the hemisphere

Latin America’s rejection of U.S. diplomatic dominance at the Cartagena, Colombia, summit signifies the decline of U.S. power in the region.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2012

The 2012 Summit of the Americas ended Sunday, April 15, without a closing statement as is traditional. In fact, it ended with acrimony.

Countries with political regimes as varied as Colombia, Brazil, and Bolivia condemned the refusal of the United States to formally recognize Cuba, thus allowing that country to attend. Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, did not even attend the summit to protest Cuba’s exclusion. By the end of the meeting, Evo Morales, Bolivian President, made it clear that no future summits would occur if Cuba were not included.

Along with political conflict between the United States and Canada and the rest of the Hemisphere countries over Cuba, most rejected the decades-long violent and destructive “war on drugs” launched by the United States in the twentieth century to maintain a rationale for a pervasive military presence in the region.

Also, President Cristina Fernandez of Argentina left the meeting early to protest the lack of U.S. support for her country’s claims on the Malvinas Islands.

The Summit of the Americas was launched in 1994 by President Clinton to advance Hemisphere diplomacy beyond the traditional regional organization, the Organization of American States. Clinton and George Bush used the summits to lobby for a Hemisphere-wide free trade agreement, a North America Free Trade Agreement, writ large.

In 2003, the former Brazilian President, Luiz Inacion Lula da Silva, demanded that the United States end farm subsidies for U.S. products before Brazil would consider a trade agreement. Subsequently Brazil joined forces with Russia, India, and China (the BRICs) to challenge the hegemony of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan in the global economy.

While visible global political/military contests in the twenty-first century centered in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, significant changes have been occurring in Latin America. A continent pillaged by Spain, Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands for hundreds of years has been doggedly moving towards political autonomy and economic independence.

Colonialism came to an end with the Spanish/Cuban/American war in 1898. In its place, the United States established neocolonial control over the politics and economics of virtually every country in the Hemisphere. At first, from 1898 until 1933, the U.S. maintained control through repeated military interventions (over 30 in 35 years with long marine military occupations of Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua).

From the 1930s until the 1980s, U.S. control was maintained by putting in place and supporting military dictatorships in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. During the time Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton were in office, control was enhanced by so-called “neoliberal” economic policies. These demanded of countries, increasingly tied to international banks by crippling debt, the creation of open markets, foreign economic penetration, and reduced domestic spending for its own citizens.

During the years of dictatorship and neoliberalism, the primary example of resistance to U.S. economic imperialism and militarism was Cuba. For that reason, the United States put in place a policy of diplomatic isolation, an economic blockade, and a 50-year campaign to subvert and overthrow the revolutionary government.

As the 2012 election season approaches, presidential candidate Barack Obama, apparently felt he could not buck the declining but still influential counterrevolutionary Cuban Americans of South Florida, despite what Latin America thinks.

Latin America’s rejection of U.S. diplomatic dominance at the Cartagena, Colombia, summit signifies the decline of U.S. power in the region. The power of the newly formed Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), an organization promoting economic and political cooperation in the region constitutes one kind of challenge to the United States. Another is the trade regime, Common Southern Market or Mercosur, which has a membership of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay (with membership of Venezuela in process, and associate membership status for Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

More important, economic populist (some say 21st century socialist) regimes are in power now in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and, of course, Cuba. In addition center/left regimes rule in Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Peru.

Hal Weitzman documents in Latin Lessons: How South America Stopped Listening to the United States and Started Prospering (Wiley, 2012) Latin America’s growing relationships with China and to a lesser extent Europe. He identifies a troubling contradiction in the U.S. regional relationship:

The longer-term trend is clear: while Latin America becomes an increasingly more important trade partner for the United States with every passing year, the United States is becoming less and less important to Latin America.

And finally, in advance of electoral shifts to the Left in the region, mass organizations all around the Hemisphere have emerged based on class, gender, and race. Also indigenous people struggling to keep their land in the face of expropriation by multinational corporations have risen up, even against what they regard as oppressive policies of populist regimes.

The World Social Forum, launched as a dialogue among the poor and oppressed in Porte Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, was a forerunner of the Occupy movements of our own day.

In short, the rejection of United States policies at the summit signifies the fundamental transformation of U.S/Latin American relations. The winds of change are becoming gusts.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Obama and Latin America Just More of the Same

Early promise: Barack Obama, shown addressing the Cuban American National Foundation on Cuba and Latin American policy at a Cuban Independence Day Celebration in Miami in 2008, loosened travel restriction for Cuban Americans. Photo from AP.
Promise unfulfilled:
A progressive response
to Obama's Latin American policy

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 22, 2010

Hopes for change in United States relations with Latin America

Progressives were more hopeful about a change in United States foreign policy toward Latin American than any place else as Barack Obama assumed office in January 2009. Even though the nation’s attention was appropriately fixated on two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, and a deepening threat of war in the Middle East, they thought that the new administration could most easily begin to reshape the image of the United States role in the world in the Western Hemisphere.

Many scholar/activists urged the new administration to reverse the history of U.S. imperial rule in the Western Hemisphere by recognizing spreading populist politics in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.

Also, most commentators on Latin America proclaimed that it was time to end the 50-year blockade of Cuba, advocating that the United States reestablish formal diplomatic relations with the Hemisphere’s first Socialist country, and endorsing the right of any nation to choose its own destiny. Particularly, this principle should be applied to United States relations with the new populist regimes and particularly Venezuela as it pursues what it calls “21st century socialism.

In addition, many observers assumed that the United States would use its influence and resources to reduce the bloody violence in the 50-year civil war in Colombia and in the process reverse war-like hostilities between Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. “The war on drugs,” the latest rallying cry for continuing U.S. military intervention in the region, would be reversed.

Progressives expected that United States material and diplomatic resources in the Hemisphere would shift from military transfers to multilateral economic assistance to facilitate continued economic development in the region. The United States, from this perspective, would respect those nations who chose to reject the neoliberal model of development based upon privatization of public institutions, reductions in government participation in local economies, and the promotion of exports at the expense of production for domestic needs.

In conjunction with declining advocacy of neoliberal policies, it was hoped that the United States in the new administration would move toward an immigration reform policy that recognizes the connections between harsh and austere economic policies forced on Latin American countries and the migration of people, desperately seeking work, to other countries.

In a January, 2010 document the Council on Hemisphere Affairs (COHA) summarized the condition of United States/Latin American relations when President Obama came into office:

Productive cooperation on a variety of shared regional concerns had been all but ignored by a Bush administration completely distracted by the Iraqi War, and in favor of an approach characterized by confrontation, diplomatic bullying, and the continued pursuit of policies detrimental to the abiding interests of both Latin America and the United States. Apparently recognizing this, Obama brought with him a promise to begin a “new chapter in the story of the Americas,” in which the U.S. leader would follow an inclusive and relevant approach to regional diplomacy, coupled with a pledge to begin matching rhetoric with deeds.” (COHA, January 2010)

Early positive policy initiatives

Some administration initiatives in 2009 indicated that the Obama administration would begin the process of transforming the history of relations with the region. First, the administration loosened restrictions on Cuban American travel to the island, including giving them more rights to transfer funds to their families on the island. This reversed the Bush administration’s policies which reduced rights of travel and monetary transfer of funds from U.S. citizens of Cuban heritage to their relatives.

Second, the word inside the beltway was that this initial policy change on Cuba would be followed in short order by the end of the United States blockade of Cuba.

Third, at a meeting of Hemisphere leaders, President Obama was photographed shaking hands with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Neoconservatives used the image to prove that Obama was capitulating to Venezuelan Socialism, which was part of the new Cuban/Venezuelan cabal. Moderate observers of U.S. policy, on the other hand, perceived the photo op as an example of the maturing United States policy

Fourth, when military officers and economic elites in Honduras carried out a coup, ejecting one of their own who had begun to improve ties to the Venezuelan-led reform currents in the Hemisphere, the Obama administration, as virtually every regime in the Hemisphere, condemned the military coup. The United States made it clear that military coups, while part of the old political ways in the region, were no longer acceptable. The Organization of American States ejected the illegal regime from the regional grouping.

Colombia: Red carpet for U.S. military bases. Photo from MOIR.

United States Latin American policy:
The more things change the more they stay the same

Much of the Latin American foreign policy agenda progressives expected of the new administration has not been implemented. Despite growing pressure from the left and right, agricultural and tourist interests and spokespersons from major business groups, the blockade of Cuba has not been ended.

The Cuban Five, Cuban citizens tried and convicted illegally for working to uncover terrorist plots targeted against their country, remain in prison. Despite rumors of change, policies prohibiting hundreds of university and high school educational exchanges with Cuba are still in place.

Public statements from foreign policy spokespersons today directed against Cuba have the same Cold War character as those in the past. And the mainstream media continue to characterize the island nation as an archaic dictatorship surviving only because of Venezuelan oil money.

The United States, after the dramatic Obama/Chavez handshake, has continued to publicly condemn the influence of Venezuela in the region, and, by beefing up the Colombian military, has increased tensions between the two neighboring nations.

After an initial credible statement condemning the coup in Honduras, the United States worked to circumvent the ousted Honduran leader from reassuming office and supported a flawed election that the coup plotters orchestrated in November, 2009. Meanwhile violence inside Honduras, targeting anti-government activists and journalists, has risen significantly.

Beltway influentials close to the Honduran business class and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have worked to undermine the continued condemnation of the Honduran coup around the Hemisphere.

The United States has escalated its military presence in the region.

First, the United States and the government of Colombia have initiated a deal to create seven new military bases in Colombia. This clear tilt toward the latter has increased tensions between Colombia and her neighbors to the east and west, Venezuela and Ecuador. The “war on drugs” continues.

Second, with a curious shift in Costa Rican policy, that country has authorized a large U.S. naval presence in Central American coastal waters.

Finally, the pattern of United States economic and military assistance in the region reflects more continuity in U.S. policy than change. For example, COHA points out that between 2008 and 2010 there has been a substantial increase in military and police assistance to the region (from $1.13 billion in 2008 to $1.4 billion in 2010) and a modest decline in economic assistance (from $1.7 in 2008 to $1.64 billion in 2010).

With the establishment of seven new bases in Colombia and the presence of a U.S. naval fleet in the Caribbean, COHA argues, Latin American countries, fearful of declining regional security may be enticed or frightened to purchase more arms, setting off an arms race in the region.

For many years national defense budgets remained virtually unchanged in South America, but reports are surfacing about significant new arms purchases by Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Chile, and Colombia, among others in South America. Whether or not you call it an arms race, the increase is substantial. Led by arms purchases, South America’s defense spending increased by 30 percent from 2007 to 2008, reaching $50 billion.


A progressive agenda for United States foreign policy
in the Western Hemisphere

The vision of a progressive foreign policy agenda for Latin America is clear. The United States must move away from a five hundred year policy of colonialism and neocolonialism; by the Spanish, the Portuguese, the British, and most recently the United States.

The imperial program that emerged with the U.S. occupation of Cuba in the late 19th century to the support of the repressive Colombian regime and the successors to the military junta in Honduras today must be rejected.

Latin American nations must be allowed to choose their own agenda. In fact, experiments with democracy, populism, and 21st century Socialism are experiments from which the United States could learn.

Specifically a progressive Latin American policy should include:

• an end to arms transfers
• the elimination of U.S. bases and naval maneuvers in the region
• withdrawal of support from the corrupt and violent government of Colombia
• opening up serious dialogue with Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and other regimes which have rejected the IMF neo-liberal policies
• establishing full diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba
• exonerating the Cuban Five
• working with Hemisphere nations to develop comprehensive immigration reform that provides work and humane living conditions for migrant workers everywhere
• establishing dialogue with Hemisphere economic and political institutions that have been created to protect the rights of national self-determination of participating countries

With the changing global role of the United States in the international system and the growing international connections being established between countries of the Global South, including Latin America, progressives must demand that United States foreign policy no longer stand against historical demands for progressive social change.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Honduras and Western Hemisphere : Summer Rerun?

A new day dawns in the Western Hemisphere:
The old day not yet buried

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 1, 2009

Sunday the Honduran military carried out a coup ousting President Manuel Zelaya from power. Almost immediately leaders of Western Hemisphere nations condemned the actions taken in Tegucigalpa, the capital city. For example, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Lula) clearly pointed out that the days of military coups as a mechanism of the transfer of power are over in Latin America.

President Obama said on Monday that "It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition rather than democratic elections… The region has made enormous progress over the last 20 years in establishing democratic traditions in Central America and Latin America. We don't want to go back to a dark past."

On Tuesday, the United Nations General Assembly passed by acclamation a non-binding resolution condemning the military action and demanding that Zelaya be returned to office. Political opposites from Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Evo Morales to Barack Obama have taken the same position on the events in Honduras, although Chavez articulated the view that the United States had a role in the coup.

The New York Times, while reporting these events and the mass mobilizations in Honduras protesting the coup, was careful to point out that ousted President Zelaya after all was closely allied with Hugo Chavez and linked Honduras to the Chavez led “leftist alliance, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.” The Times further reported that there were large scale protests in the capital of Honduras in support of the coup. And after all, they suggested, Zelaya would have had no world significance if it were not for the coup which made him famous.

Rather than framing the coup and global reaction to it as business as usual in Latin America, and business tied to the particular interests of all the parties-leftist elites, generals, the United States, street demonstrators of all sorts-the events in Central America should be seen as part of broader historical forces.

First, the Western Hemisphere has experienced hundreds of years of shifting external interference, mass murder and economic exploitation of natural resources, agricultural lands, cheap labor, and sweat shop workers. The Spanish, the British, and the United States figured most prominently in this unhappy story, referred to by Eduardo Galeano as “five centuries of the pillage of a continent.”

Second, twentieth century Central America was dramatically shaped by over thirty U.S. military incursions and occupations in Central America and the Caribbean between 1898 and the 1930s. For example, U.S. troops were sent to Honduras in 1903, 1907, 1911,1912, 1919, and 1924-25.

Third, economic ruling classes in the Hemisphere and their foreign partners increasingly were forced to rely on strong military forces to crush opposition to elite rule and devastating poverty and exploitation. Particularly in Central America, the military as an institution became a material force, sometimes independent of the economic ruling class. From the early 1930s until the end of World War II military dictatorships ruled each of the five Central American countries. Later, in the height of the Cold War in the 1970s, 2/3 of the land mass and population of Latin America was ruled by brutal military dictatorship; Argentina, Brazil, Chile being the most prominent.

Fourth, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan brought the struggle against “international communism” to Central America. He launched and supported brutal wars against the Salvadoran and Nicaraguan people and looked the other way as the Guatemalan generals engaged in genocide against the majority indigenous population of that country. Probably 400,000 Central America peoples died in these U.S. supported wars.

Honduras, heretofore a country with less violent military rule and only a modest recipient of U.S. military aid, became the military base for U.S. operations in the region; training the contra rebels fighting against the Nicaraguan government and providing training and military support operations for Salvadoran troops fighting against FMLN rebels. Honduras received more military aid from the United States in the mid-1980s, than it did during the prior thirty years. Thousands of U.S. troops, numerous air strips, and field exercises for summer National Guard troops made Honduras a U.S. armed camp.

Fifth, parallel to the war on communism in the Western Hemisphere, the Reagan administration forced on the countries of the region the neo-liberal economic policies of downsizing government, deregulation, privatization, free trade, and shifts to export-oriented production. In the 1980s, the economic consequences of these policies were referred to by Latin American scholars as “the lost decade.”

While the economies of Central American countries improved since the 1980s, they remain poor and dependent. Honduras is the poorest of the five countries in the region. Its per capital Gross Domestic Product in 2003 was $803 (the regional figure was $1,405). A little over 9 percent of its earnings come from overseas remittances. Honduran debt constitutes 66 percent of total GDP. And life expectancy is 66 years.

This brief review of some of the Latin American experience, and it has been most brutal in Central America, is part of the story of the Sunday coup.

First, we must remember that whenever the interests of foreign investors (particularly from the United States), domestic ruling classes and/or military elites were threatened by international political forces and/or domestic mobilization of workers and peasants, the military moved in to reverse the forces of history.

Second, the United States has played a direct role in such interventions and has provided military assistance and training for military officers of all Latin American militaries ever since the end of World War II. (The training facility used to be called The School of the Americas).

Third, military interventionism and covert operations have been paralleled by economic intervention through the debt system, foreign investment, trade agreements, and quotas and embargoes of goods from Latin American countries.

Fourth, the winds of change that were initiated in the 1960s in the region were first stifled and isolated, then spread in the 1980s and beyond. Most recently, countries as varied as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela have begun to step in a new direction; away from the neo-liberal economic model, away from deference to traditional great powers, and in resistance to the United States. (Honduras has begun to move in this direction as well).

Most importantly, these countries, and other countries from the Global South in Asia and Africa, have begun to construct new economic and political institutions that will transform the International economic and political system after 500 years of North Atlantic rule. The fact that 192 countries in the United Nations said no to the Honduran coup suggests that this battle goes beyond the simplistic New York Times frame that the Honduran battle is merely about competing special interests.

It may be that the Obama administration understands the new global reality, or at least realizes that the United States must figure out ways to adapt to it.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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