In what will probably be his last visit to our hemisphere before he leaves the presidency of the United States, President Obama chose two countries with which his country has sought to normalize relations, Cuba and Argentina. The process of diplomatic normalization with Cuba has been in train for some time, and Obama’s visit there is really the culmination of a long period of indirect and direct negotiation to which, as has now become widely known, Pope Francis has made a major contribution. And in the case of Argentina, the visit is really the result of a change of government, with the election of a president more partial to conventional democratic practices and less apparently populist than the last holder of the position there.
President Obama will have been well aware, on his assumption of office, that positive sentiment in Latin America and the Caribbean towards normalization of relations between Cuba and the United States had evolved substantially, even though somewhat slowly, in the aftermath of the end of communist rule in Russia and the East European states. For over the last two to three years in particular, it also became clear to him that the Latin American states of the hemisphere had firmly rejected any stance of keeping Cuba aloof. And in that connection, and in the light of the collapse of that country’s economic and geopolitical underpinnings, it was inevitable that it would have to take steps to move away from its existence in a kind of no man’s land, and re-establish itself, primarily, in Latin American and Caribbean relationships, so many of which would be integrally related to an urgent reorganization of its economy.
Yet, in the United States, there has remained a degree of concern as to how Mr Obama would find a path towards normalization, given that the American hostility to Cuba was not only based on its choice of orientation to the communist world, but to the fact that this entailed a choice of economic system which involved Cuban possession of foreign, in particular American, owned economic investments. But on the other hand, the President also recognized that the Cuban government would have to find a way of reorganizing its economy that inevitably implied foreign economic participation.
The partial withdrawal of Fidel Castro from direct, or formal, leadership of the regime has obviously facilitated a progressive renewal of informal connections, however indirect, and the legitimization of this, facilitated by the Pope’s intervention, has tended to inhibit traditional expressions of American domestic hostility towards the Cuban regime. And of course, President Obama has chosen to hasten the process of relatively indirect diplomacy towards the end of his last term when any domestic political hostility would be, from the perspective of his own career, electorally meaningless.
In addition, what is interesting to observe is that contenders for the American presidency, appear to have recognized that there is no longer any negative sentiment on the Latin American continent itself, in the light of clear indications on the part of the Cuban government that while it maintains the communist-type political regime, the substantial tourism-oriented element of its economy will require external participation as the government seeks, inevitably, to lessen the burden of its own economic intervention in sustaining that sector.
It is interesting that there has been little discussion, and in particular negative discussion in an election year, as to whether the US government should not have been raising issues pertaining to the nature of government in the country. But it is probably the case that sentiment in the US now understands that there is little support for such a posture in Latin America; and perhaps more importantly, American private investors also understand that any future participation in the Cuban economy need not necessarily be open to the US at its own pleasure, or in its own time.
And on the other hand, of course, it is increasingly understood in the United States that Latin American political and governmental sentiment, in a period of active search by governments for a space in the new globalised economy, will no longer accept political antagonism as a rationale for rejecting economic participation in countries possessing economies presently dissimilar to their own.
This latter sentiment is playing out in the wider continent. It is instructive that President Obama left Cuba to visit Argentina, where a new government has recently assumed office. For relations between the US and that country have been relatively lukewarm over the last decade and a half, a period in which what can be described as the nationalist governments of President Nestor Kirchner and then his wife Christina Fernandez Kirchner, held office.
The election of Mauricio Macri to the presidency is, no doubt, taken by the US government to represent an end to what it has perceived as a flirtation with economic nationalism not particularly favourable to the United States. President Obama will undoubtedly have wished to indicate support for Macri’s more favourable liberal orientation, and to leave a message that, in the free elections to be held shortly in the US, in a context in which his party’s opponents are themselves engaging in nationalist-type sentiments, the apparent tolerance that characterised his regime, is not an inevitability.
The President will surely have been bearing in mind current trends in Brazil, where the pro-left government of President Dilma Rousseff, successor since 2010 to that of Lula da Silva, has now found itself the object of extreme popular hostility in a period of economic difficulty. President Rousseff has not, over the period of her government now into a second term, been deemed by the United States to have been particularly cooperative.
The President did not visit Brazil, though President Rousseff did visit the United States last year, at a time of difficulty between the two countries that was the result of revelations that the Brazilian president had been under surveillance by the US National Security Agency in 2013, a matter for which Rousseff’s government had required a formal apology which, however, was not forthcoming.
No doubt, the US is closely observing the situation as it evolves in Brazil, one in which the opponents of the regime have sought to compromise former President Lula, and thus minimize his ability to assist Rousseff in her difficulties, even though she has now formally attempted to involve him in the government. Relations between the two countries will now await the evolution of the situation in Brazil, and then the election of a new President in the United States.
