Someone should explain to President Obama
By
Manuel E. Yepe
A
CubaNews translation by Will Reissner
Edited
by Walter Lippmann
Someone
should explain to President Obama that the changes in the panorama of
Latin America and the Caribbean that he saw up close at the OAS
Summit in Port of Spain began in 1959, in Cuba. You cannot separate
the tree from its roots.
The
Cuban revolution was the event that blazed the trail that, in accord
with the specific conditions of each nation in the Latin American and
Caribbean region, the peoples have traveled along different routes to
make themselves a little freer and to gain greater mastery of their
riches and their dreams.
From
the triumph of the Cuban revolution to the 2009 victory of the
presidential candidate of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation
Front in El Salvador, in barely 50 years, the peoples living south of
the United States have been waging and winning struggles to achieve
their second and definitive independence. These struggles, taken as a
whole, reflect the great changes in Latin America and the Caribbean,
which are in such stark contrast to Washington’s rigid attachment
to an unsustainable past of imperial domination.
There
are many admirers of Obama who lament that with relation to Cuba,
they see him repeating slogans spawned by the worst neoconservative
rhetoric.
We
have regularly seen the situation where Obama formulates ideas with a
progressive and original cast, his advisors then come forward to
correct what the president has said.
This
happened, for example, during the OAS Summit in Trinidad and Tobago,
when the president’s chief advisor, Jeffrey Davidow, identified in
the press as “Director, Summit of the Americas,” offered the
press his version of a specific action by the president and it seemed
as if there had been two completely different exchanges.
“While
Obama was pressing for a new diplomacy, Davidow was practicing the
old,” the Democratic activist Tom Hayden explained in an article
published April 21 in the Huffington Post website entitled “Obama
and His Dinosaur in Trinidad.”
When,
in a diplomatic gesture of great political significance, Venezuelan
president Hugo Chávez gave Obama a book by the acclaimed Uruguayan
writer Eduardo Galeano on the history of the interference by the
governments of the United States in Latin America, and President
Obama welcomed the act as “a nice gesture,” Davidow, in an
interview with the ABC television network, made disparaging remarks
about the behavior of the Venezuelan chief of state.
Davidow
said that Hugo Chávez hoped to benefit from Obama’s popularity in
Venezuela, “which is greater than his own.” With this assertion
the advisor’s intention went beyond trying to ridicule his chief,
putting forward a speculation that ignores the many occasions when
Chávez has won resounding victories in election campaigns in his
country and the heightened patriotism of Venezuelans.
These
opinions voiced by the presidential advisor were in fact in tune with
the criticisms that the former vice-president Richard Cheney made
about the relationship with Chávez on the Fox channel in an
interview where he also tried to defend the CIA’s methods of
interrogation and to assert that the U.S. has, for a long time, been
the leading country of the world and “I don’t think we have much
to apologize for,” thereby criticizing Obama’s public statements
on his trip to Europe.
In
the same vein were statements uttered by Newt Gingrich, said to have
his eye on the Republican presidential candidacy in 2012. Gingrich
stated that the image that Obama projected by shaking hands with the
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez reminded him of ex-president Jimmy
Carter, whom the neoconservatives disdainfully describe as a
“weakling.”
Not
very much took place at the Summit of the Americas, but enough
happened to lead to the conclusion that the United States is isolated
in a hemisphere that it had dominated at its whim until recently.
This is the result of a process of struggles by the region’s
peoples for their independence, struggles that were paradoxically
spurred by the heightened expansionist and interventionist aims of
the U.S. neoconservatives and their eagerness to establish an
ill-advised “new American century” of domination.
Many
people in the United States who are aware of the Cuban reality
support and sympathize with Barack Obama. They see him as the
intelligent and honest person their country needs in the present
crisis. But they have been worried by the fact that the new president
is being advised by people who are used by or in the thrall of the
neoconservatives, among them Hillary Clinton.
They
can see that the neoconservative cabal that has controlled real power
in the United States since Ronald Reagan’s administration, who
survived and continued to exercise power “behind the scenes”
during the Bill Clinton period, and then regained it through the
administration of George W. Bush, hopes to carry-on in the shadows
during Barack Obama’s time, preventing, if possible, concessions
such as eliminating the blockade on Cuba, until such time as the
neoconservatives can reemerge into full sunlight.
This,
in my opinion, is how many observers from the most objective and
reasonable sectors of U.S. politics see things.
Manuel
E. Yepe Menéndez is a lawyer, economist and journalist. He works as
a professor at the Higher Institute of International Relations in
Havana.
