With nearly a year under his belt, President Obama has had several chances to deliver on his ambitions to strengthen ties with Latin America. The administration made several determined and calculated steps in the first months of 2009 by making diplomatic gestures to Cuba and supportive stances with Zelaya and Honduras. However, the footprints of these tactics have since all but faded.
Obama’s many motions during his campaign led people to believe that relations with Cuba and the United States would be loosened after nearly half a century of asphyxiation. He spoke at the Cuban-American National Foundation’s headquarters where he thundered about eliminating family travel restrictions between the two countries and beginning more open and honest dialogue between the two governments.
The campaign chatter seemed like it would be acted upon, with Cuba occupying much of the president’s more demonstrable moves in the first half of 2009. Obama put together a package of initiatives to lift the family travel restrictions/remittances, allowing telecom deal negotiations with Cuba, and to passively support Cuba speaking to the Organization of Americas in order for inroads to be created for the country to potentially rejoin this governing body down the road. There was even a postal agreement and potential counternarcotics collaboration winking down the road. However, many were suspect of these steps. As Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations stated, "This is a cautious first step by a president whose political advisers are looking at the Florida electoral vote and who are not looking at this as a matter of foreign policy. That's the big problem with Cuba policy. We have a policy toward Miami and not toward Havana."
And the momentum did slow. The Helms-Burton law states that only Congress, and not the executive branch, has the power to lift economic sanctions unilaterally. Of course Obama knew this, and leverage this knowledge to allow himself immunity from criticism that he didn’t do all he could to bridge the gap between the two countries. He did not, however, do what was in fact in his power, namely taking Cuba off of the State Sponsors of Terrorism list and loosening travel restrictions significantly. Rather, the Obama administration required Cuba to do some heavy lifting in order to have these mainstays relinquished, such as releasing political prisoners and conforming to the US idea of democracy. Of course it was known that Cuba would not commit this kind of political suicide within its borders and so the status quo of the last fifty years was maintained. The past remained the front end of the present.
The Obama administration was quite righteously mighty with its support of the ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya after his removal from power in June. Zelaya, a man of the people who tried to raise the minimum wage in a country where 60 percent of the citizenry live in poverty, was becoming a threat to the small but powerful upper class who wanted to keep their separation from the plebs as far as possible.
After the military coup, Obama sternly condemned this action and called for democratic order to be restored and Zelaya to be placed back into power. However, actions did not mimic words, as Obama’s policy shifted from demand to demure. Obama wanted to see if the Organization of American States could create enough friction to bring order back to Honduras without having to unilaterally take on a leadership role.
This did not work. The administration was nearly inert in applying pressure to the Honduran de facto government in any way. The plan obviously did not work and the US did not freeze bank accounts or withhold visas as a show of discontent over the military coup keeping Zelaya from his rightful seat. This was an opportunity for the US to erase its past support of coups, most notably in Venezuela and Haiti. The opportunity was not taken.
Then the United States recognized the November elections held under military rule that had Pepe Lobo crowned the winner. Obama’s ambassador Hugo Llorens called it “a great celebration of democracy." It was anything but. The United States was nearly alone in its support of this election and distanced itself from Latin America and Europe in this regard. As a result of our support for this election, the US preserved the use of Honduras’ Palmerola Air Base, a very valuable piece of real estate considering our current tensions with Brazil, Chile and Venezuela about our base in Colombia.
The US profited by supporting this military coup. Honduran democracy was maybe an American word away from being restored, given the close connection between the Pentagon and the Honduran military. But Obama again reverted to the traditional policies of the past and the rest was history.
The British scholar Gordon Connell-Smith wrote that while America pays “lip-service to the encouragement of representative democracy in Latin America, the United States has a strong interest in just the reverse.” Perhaps he’s right, and our pilfering policies of yesteryear actually do continue to this day but in a different form. It was William Faulkner who once wrote that “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” President Obama knows this maxim, since he misquoted it during his A More Perfect Union speech by adding the words “and buried” to the end of the first sentence. Fitting, it seems, because if our policies don’t change, our future relations with Latin America won’t be dead, but they’ll nevertheless be buried.
