The Americanistas

(Image: eCMetrics)

I think it’s one of the first quantitative pieces of evidence showing the extent to which Afrodescendant populations in Latin America are viewing Obama’s election as a huge shift in the hemisphere’s racial history.

It’s in a poll that hasn’t received much attention. U.S.-based consulting company eCMetrics surveyed 1600 Latin American Internet surfers in the first two weeks of 2009 on their expectations regarding Barack Obama’s government. Besides revealing a predictable surge of optimism as they looked beyond the unpopular government of President Bush, it did serve up some interesting results.

For one, Brazilians, and especially mixed-race Brazilians, tended to view Obama’s racial background as more important than the fact that he was elected with a huge surge of voter participation.

Overall, 65% of Brazilians said the election was most significant because of the election of an African-American candidate. But among those Brazilians who identified themselves as being of African descent, that number was 72%.

In contrast, in Argentina and Mexico, countries with smaller Afrodescendant populations, the more significant result turned out to be not Obama’s breaking of racial barriers, but his election amidst unprecedented voter turnout (47% and 55% respectively).

A full rundown of the poll can be found here in Portuguese.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez famously gave Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America at the recent Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. The spectacle surrounding the gift catapulted Galeano’s book to the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list. Galeano later thanked Chávez for giving his anti-colonial diatribe an Oprah-book-club-like boost. The Uruguayan writer joked that Dracula and himself shared the honor of creating the vampire genre.

When asked if Obama would read the book, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs replied, “I think it’s in Spanish, so that might be a tad on the difficult side.”

Obama effectively closed that chapter at the recent White House Correspondent’s Dinner. The event is a Washington tradition begun in the 1920s. Every U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the event. The dinner is part comedy roast, fund raiser and tribute. The press likes to call it the moment the president becomes “Comedian-in-Chief.”

About 10 minutes into his monologue, Obama began a joke saying he was fulfilling his campaign promise of turning around U.S. relations with the world, citing meetings with the Japanese and British prime ministers. Obama continued, “But as I said during the campaign, we can’t just talk to our friends. As hard as it is, we also have to talk to our enemies, and I’ve begun to do exactly that. Take a look at the monitor there.”

The jumbo-tron cut to a picture of Obama sitting in the Oval Office with a man dressed as a pirate. (Not sure if the costume was modeled on Captain Hook or Captain Morgan.) The audience laughed.

Obama then added, “Now, let me be clear, just because he handed me a copy of Peter Pan does not mean that I’m going to read it — (laughter) — but it’s good diplomatic practice to just accept these gifts.”

Too bad. Obama would have gained a lot of insights from Galeano’s book.

The full joke sequence can be viewed here (put the cursor at about 3:57):

If you live in a glass house don’t throw stones. It’s interesting that Republican guru Newt Gingrich has gone on an instant media tour to denounce Obama’s handshake with Hugo Chávez. Gingrich has a history of blocking inquiries into the sanguinary actions of right-wing Latin American dictatorships. It appears dictatorships only earn Gingrich’s P.R. help if they’re right wing and former White House allies.

Not only that, but it appears he’s all for celebrating democracy and its results (Chávez can be accused of many things, but not of failing to win elections), but only as long as the results are to his liking.

In the mid-1990s, Rep. Gingrich tried to limit inquiries into the U.S. role in funding and feeding intelligence to Guatemala’s murderous military dictatorship, which was behind the deaths of dozens of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans during that country’s Civil War.

After Obama’s inauguration, Gingrich eagerly jumped on the Obama bandwagon, writing that the ceremony sent a powerful message to dictators everywhere:

The message sent by the Obama inauguration, Gingrich wrote, “was aimed straight at the heart of all the dictators, theocrats, oligarchs and military strongmen who rationalize their tyranny with the excuse that their people aren’t ‘ready’ for democracy: In the course of a single generation, the son of an immigrant from a poor country in Africa rose in America to be the leader of the free world.

Well apparently Gingrich believes Venezuela’s people aren’t ‘ready’ for democracy. They’ve voted for Hugo Chávez in 1998, 2000, and 2006. When criticizing Obama for engaging Chávez, Republicans should be ready to defend their own woeful records on human rights abroad. Chávez has been undemocratic in his handling of many issues within Venezuela, and his record on basic freedoms is at least shaky, but he’s no Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Wary engagement: it’s the new paradigm in Washington D.C. for relations with Latin America’s more combative governments. As was to be expected, President Obama’s already trying to fend off criticisms for his amiable interactions with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez at the just-concluded Summit of the Americas. On Sunday, he answered criticisms while still in Trinidad, acknowledging Chávez anti-U.S. rhetoric was certainly inflammatory, and Chávez’s meddling in regional affairs sometimes worrisome. However, Obama said there was more to gain by engaging with Chávez, especially considering he posed no military threat and was in fact an investor in the U.S. economy through Venezuela’s ownership of Citgo.

Today, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s book: The Open Veins of Latin America, a book that’s one of Chávez’s favorites and he often quotes from. I wonder if Obama will flip through it, at least. It’s definitely a classic of 1960s-style leftist scholarship, forcefully written, a kind of encyclopedic account of how Europe and the United States treated Latin America as a big commodity piñata to be plundered at will. And how the United States and Europe (especially the English) manipulated the region’s politics and wielded a big stick in order to whack at will at this piñata.

If a bit outdated and too willing to turn a blind eye to Latin America’s own faults, the book is still worth reading. At the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Obama criticized Latin Americans for being too willing to point the finger north whenever they need an explanation for their problems, so that flaw in the book would probably not agree with the States’ first black president. Here’s a sample few sentences:

“In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism, but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn’t a stage of development, but its consequence…underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it.”

In other words, Latin America’s underdevelopment subsidizes rich countries’ overdevelopment. I think that recent dramatic reductions in poverty in Brazil and Mexico show that whatever the history of plunder, it’s not beyond Latin American governments to act against inequality and poverty. When they take decisive action to reduce economic inequality (with cash reward programs like Bolsa Familia in Brazil and Oportunidades in Mexico), it is possible for capitalism and social democracies to develop side by side. It’s too bad so much of the Summit of the Americas spotlight has been gobbled up by the thaw in relations between the United States and Cuba, and the warm handshakes exchanged between Obama and Chávez. Not that this diplomatic dance isn’t interesting, but if Obama were to point to these social welfare programs as models for how Latin America can move forward without divisiveness or class polarization, then other governments might emulate these programs, which redistribute wealth with accountability and transparency. To receive payments under these programs families in Mexico and Brazil must keep their children enrolled in school and take them for regular health checks and immunizations.

  

The logos of regional blocs in the hemisphere, clockwise from top-left: UNASUR, SICA, NAFTA (only economic), CARICOM.

Ahead of this weekend’s hemispheric Summit in Trinidad, President Barack Obama has offered to meet with Latin American and Caribbean leaders on a bloc-by-bloc basis, the AP reports.

Obama called Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who is acting president of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), to arrange a meeting with South American leaders. Bachelet and Obama are scheduled to talk by phone this morning to set the agenda for the talks.

The Obama administration made a similar invitation to the Central American Integration System (SICA), which is currently led by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a harsh U.S. critic. The U.S. President is already scheduled (tentatively) to sit down with leaders from the Caribbean Community (Caricom) tomorrow night after the Summit’s opening plenary. Bilateral U.S. issues with Mexico, it seems, are being dealt with in a pre-Summit meeting between the two presidents.

Breaking up the meetings in this way – though Obama will presumably have at least some bilateral meetings – makes sense: The three regions will have distinct agendas with the U.S. president.

The Caribbean leaders will ask for more economic assistance and for Washington to stop trying to block (on behalf of U.S.-based fruit companies)  the preferential access Caribbean nations have to European markets.

The Central Americans will request more economic assistance and urge Obama to press forward with a thorough immigration reform. They might also ask the President to further beef up military spending to help fight the spillover effects of Mexico’s narco wars. (Central America is also a key transshipment point for U.S.-bound South American cocaine that makes its way through Mexico.) Central American countries generally had very close ties to the Bush administration (with the exception of Ortega’s Nicaragua), so this meeting won’t be so much about reconciliation as it will be about setting a renewed sub-regional agenda.

In South America, the scenario is quite different. The region is home to nearly all of the governments that have swung to the left in recent years, including vocal U.S. critics such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. All three leaders have expelled U.S. officials in recent years, while Bolivia and Venezuela have practically severed diplomatic ties with Washington.

The South America meeting will be Obama’s largest challenge. Besides the economic crisis, new financing initiatives, and lingering trade disputes (e.g. Doha, Colombia’s FTA), leaders will likely bring up the Cuba issue. All South American governments have called on Washington to change its Cuba policy, and those that stand to make the loudest pitch are Bolivia, Venezuela, maybe Ecuador, and possibly Paraguay. The leaders of these four countries are currently meeting in Caracas, under the auspices of Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas initiative, which includes Cuba, to set a common strategy for the Trinidad Summit.

Before making the case for Cuba, however, the region’s more radical left-leaning leaders will first try to feel out Obama’s intentions on improving U.S. relations with their own countries. This will be a delicate dance: In the eyes of these leaders, all of whom felt grossly insulted by the Bush administration, it should be Barack Obama that tries to woo them, not the other way around.

If Obama manages to restore ties with both Bolivia and Venezuela, this will be a big step forward. On that front, the U.S. administration seems to count on the welcome support of Brazil, which is increasingly  positioning itself as a regional interlocutor. No foreign leaders have hit it off so well with Obama as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

If Obama can strike the right notes with South American leaders in Trinidad and if he does more “listening than lecturing,” as he himself once said, U.S.-Latin America relations could enter a promising new stage.

Obama on the campaign trail at the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami.

A final Cuba-U.S. rapprochement won’t happen or be orchestrated at the Summit of the Americas this week convened by the Organization of American States (OAS). An end to the U.S. embargo and the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the two countries are still quite a ways off, but the chances of that happening have never been better.

The end of Bush-era restrictions on Cuban-Americans’ ability to travel and to send money to the island seems about as far as the Obama administration is willing to go at this point. (It was an explicit campaign promise (pdf).) Obama’s team and other heavyweights within the OAS have been at pains to avoid the possibility of Cuba dominating the April 17-19 Summit, which is supposed to focus on the economic crisis and security issues.

Cuba, suspended from the OAS since 1962, is barred from participating in the Summit.

Although OAS president Jose Miguel Insulza and Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim have adamantly called for an end to U.S. efforts aimed at isolating Cuba, both diplomats recently suggested the Summit should table the Cuba issue for now. Still, most observers expect regional leaders will urge Obama to drop the embargo and allow the reintegration of Cuba to the OAS.

Costa Rica and El Salvador—the two remaining Latin American nations with severed diplomatic relations to Havana—recently promised to re-establish ties, leaving the United States as the only odd man out in the hemisphere.

But Cuba’s re-instatement to the OAS could be tricky because the regional body requires that its members conform to the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Any infraction of the rules outlined in the Charter can lead to the suspension of the member-state. Cuba fails to meet most of those standards.

On the U.S. policy front, Obama’s incremental approach toward a thaw in the U.S.-Cuba relationship is understandable: A 50-year-old foreign policy is not reversed by the simple flick of a switch—especially one so charged with domestic political implications and decades of Cold War baggage.

Moreover, an end to the embargo would require a legislative act by Congress. But it’s on Capitol Hill where the tables seem to be turning. On March 31, a bi-partisan group of Senators announced their support for a bill that would effectively end all travel restrictions to Cuba for U.S. citizens. The House has a nearly identical bill on the table with 120 co-sponsors.

More recently, a delegation of the Congressional Black Caucus traveled to Cuba on April 3 and met with both Raúl and Fidel Castro. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), who led the delegation made up of Democrats, told a news conference back in Washington: “We believe it is time to open dialogue and discussion with Cuba.” She said Fidel asked their advice on what Cuba can do to improve ties with the United States.

Improving U.S. ties with Cuba no longer implies such an electoral liability as it has in the past. As I noted in a previous commentary: “A poll conducted by Florida International University a month after the presidential election shows a sea change in Cuban-American opinion. The poll revealed 55 percent of Cuban-American respondents favored ending the embargo, while 65 percent said they wanted Washington to re-establish diplomatic relations with Havana.”

Even the ultra-conservative Cuban American National Foundation, which has long lobbied against loosening U.S. sanctions, publicly approved of Obama’s reversal of travel and remittance restrictions. During the U.S. presidential campaign, Cuban-Americans could be seen walking around Little Havana with T-Shirts emblazoned with “Cubama.”

Let’s hope this all translates into a new era of understanding across the Florida Straits.

Brazil Foreign Minister Celso Amorim with his Cuban counterpart Bruno Rodríguez

It’s finally Brazil’s moment in the sun, and there’s hardly a shadow in the way. Reading between the lines ahead of the April 17 Summit of the Americas, it seems pretty clear that President Obama’s Latin America team has allowed Brazil free rein in shaping hemispheric diplomacy. Given any slack, Brazil’s savvy diplomats are likely to run with it. And it seems they are: Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim has said Brazil would like to act as a go-between in the complicated relationship between  Hugo Chávez and Washington D.C., and mediate in any talks between Obama and Cuba’s Raúl Castro. Brazil has also played a huge role in mediating Bolivia’s  political crises, and has become the all-around guarantor of stability in the region.

Not only that, but the Brazilians are busy, behind the scenes, organizing a common front to protest massive U.S. farm subsidies, which put a chill on Latin American agricultural exports. Despite all the attention given to Cuba, and many Latin American leaders’ insistence it be allowed into the 34-country Summit of the Americas club, it’s likely economic issues will be the real focus of the summit at week’s end in Trinidad and Tobago.

Latin America is being hit hard by the crisis, but not as hard as the United States. Brazilian business and agribusiness leaders still speak optimistically of Brazil emerging from the crisis with an even more robust role in the global economy. That in part explains Brazil’s new confidence.

But it’s rising diplomatic prowess is also an indirect result of Washington D.C.’s disengagement with Latin America. Except for saber-rattling against the Castros, Chávez and Bolivian President Evo Morales, that was the real U.S. policy toward the south during the Bush years: neglect. Although Obama’s Latin America team, including Dan Restrepo (Western Hemisphere Director at the National Security Council) and Jeffrey Davidow (Special Adviser on Latin America), talk about a new spirit of “partnership” and “engagement,” it may be that what that really means is sitting across from Latin American leaders with Brazil as an intermediary. With the exception perhaps of Central America and Mexico, which by tradition and geography are firmly in the U.S. bailiwick, it seems Washington D.C., the Obama team included, has ceded the region to Brazil’s foreign service.

Restrepo, who’s half-Colombian, was formerly head of the Americas project at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a D.C. think tank and Democratic Party talent farm. He has consistently been conciliatory toward both Cuba and Venezuela. That’s a good thing, since Cold War-style polarization leads nowhere, but it’s also a huge opportunity for Brazil to confirm its role as Latin America’s new (soft power) kingmaker.

Photo: Agencia Brasil

Video: Present-day National Security Council member Dan Restrepo talks about Hugo Chávez (2006)