Commentary

18th April 1999

New world order:
A Cuban challenge

By Mervyn de Silva

A sole supreme superpower in search of enemies? Would that shape the new world order in the next century? This provocative question is raised by Wayne Smith, the former chief of US interests section in Havana, 1979-1982, and now a senior fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Policy.

After Saddam Hussein, and Milosevic who would be the next target? Wayne Smith believes it would be Fidel Castro and Cuba. In a contribution to the Los Angeles Times, he writes:

"Thirty nine years after the U.S. Embargo was first imposed, Fidel Castro is still in power. The embargo accomplished nothing but neither did it cause serious problems with the rest of the international community for most of the time."

Mr. Smith neglects to mention the Pope's visit. The papal blessing seriously altered the climate of opinion, regional and international. The Vatican is a state and it has "citizens" across the world, a number perhaps as high as the USA.

That did not influence American policy makers. The new Cuba Democracy Act passed in 1992 warned companies incorporated in other countries that they could not trade with Castro's Cuba. The psychological impact was quite interesting.

Throughout the Third World and NAM Countries Castro became a household name and a hero. Martyrdom came easy, giftwrapped by Santa America.

But the political debate conducted by the American Intelligentsia and the media is often sharp and self critical. Yet, the uneasy relationship between the White House, the Senate and the House does not give the popularly elected president full control over foreign policy.

In the context of a visibly failed policy, the American opinion making foreign policy elite spoke out loud and clear.

Several former Secretaries of State led by the formidable Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Lawrence Eagleburger called for a bipartisan commission. That report could have provided the president with effective political cover.

The reader should note the word "cover" since it says a lot about the American opinion-making as well as foreign policy making process.

A president has only a four year term. After the first year is spent in setting down, and two years more to get a grip on how the "machine" works, the poor prisoner in the White House is preparing for the second innings, the last - and no more big test matches.

The President is, in a way, a prisoner of the system, the party, the bureaucracy and most of all the fund-raising groups. And spokesmen of such groups do have access to the White House or to some powerful individual who does have direct access to the President. The relationship is personal rather than institutional.

But the Clinton Years or the past decade has seen "Sea changes" in American foreign policy making largely because of the Soviet implosion and the collapse of communism as a direct challenge to capitalism and democracy, parliamentary and presidential. But new challenges now face the major powers, certainly the United States, the most hegemonic.

Since 1945, power was largely concentrated in two "poles", the US and the USSR. The diffusion of power in the past few decades – Japan and a re-united Germany (economic) and China, military/nuclear. India will probably be a candidate to the Club in the near future. Stanley Hoffman, professor of government at Harvard, has written:

"Security concerns and balances are most likely to be regional rather than global; and which the United States, because of its military pre-eminence and its capacity to project abroad might see itself as the "Sun" at the centre of the solar system, there is no obvious need for the planets to turn around in such a fragmented system - now that the somewhat artificial and newer totally effective unity imposed by the Cold War is waning."

In such a global/regional environment "nonalignment" is no effective answer to new challenges.

Although increasingly criticised by many of America's allies and by opinion leaders in the US the 1996 Helms-Burton law warned international companies not to trade or invest in Cuba. But Castro has answered this threat by strengthening ties with Europe - an opening to large Western companies that are ready to invest.

But Cuba has other achievements to claim; mainly its bold policy changes that reflect a new thinking. Flexibility, a bold readiness to abandon "rigidly socialistic" policies, and a more "open" society, and economy.

The visit of Pope Paul was the striking symbol of this new thinking and the Vatican's refusal to toe the US line. Even the sole superpower cannot challenge the Vatican.

Since Castro's speeches, no orations, take 3 to 4 hours, American commentators are too easily tempted to regard him as a "bore". Not at all, almost every speech even on the most formal, ceremonial occasion, has a warm humour and mischievous wit. Castro is not just a fighter and leader but a thinker too. Turning to the American economy, and US policy, Castro, a serious student of global economics as of politics, identifies the consequences of "new-liberal globalization"

"They have ruined nations with their formula" he said of the IMF and world Bank. Stock markets, foreign investment, IMF advice and what has happened to the average Russian. His savings have "Vanished" in real terms. The Rouble has no value.

Hulftsdorp Hill

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