The Cortadas are father and son, the father a retired diplomat with service in Latin America, the son a historian who works for IBM. Their collaboration here is an effort to apply common sense to U.S. policies in a region somewhat awkwardly described as the “Caribbean, Cuba, and Central America.”
The authors assert that the Caribbean basin is of crucial strategic significance to the United States and that Americans have too long neglected the region. Then they postulate some commonsensical observations about the Caribbean that should apply to U.S. policy. First, the United States should promote Caribbean democratic systems by concentrating on the development of “service trades, light industries, and successful farming” (p. 3). Alert, it appears, to former U.N. Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick’s choices between authoritarian and totalitarian systems, the authors seem to prefer the former on the assumption that they are amenable to change through the ameliorating presence of market forces and traditional institutions. In Central America particularly, the authors view the survival of the middle class as the most profound bulwark against another Cuba.
The Cortadas do not underestimate the impact of the Cuban revolution on the Caribbean. Nor do they believe that the United States should blindly follow policies that are merely designed to counter Cuban influence rather than to build truly constructive modern societies in the region. To put things bluntly: the Caribbean is an insecure region with too many people and too little capital to sustain them. Unless the United States acts to strengthen the economies of the region, their people, especially in rural areas, will inevitably follow the Cuban model. A revived colonialism is out of the question, nor should the U.S. tolerate the status quo. Instead, it should strike out on some hold course to neutralize the Cuban revolution with some sensible diplomacy and, in the volatile isthmus, to promote regional ties such as the Common Market, all the while valiantly trying to salvage the Central American middle class.
The lesson the Cortadas present is eminently practical but probably not in the offing: it rests on the presumption that the foreign policy of the “practical society” rests on good sense; that the United States will follow in the Caribbean a course in which tradition, cultural dominance, and strategic priorities will give way to the prudent view that we should start treating the countries of the region as equals, not as children, and join them in a collaborative effort to deal with their problems, which are becoming our problems. Lamentably, the foreign policy of this country is too much affected by domestic politics: what matters more to presidents than a plan to “neutralize” Cuba is the electoral votes of Florida; and what is going to count far more than the survival of rural middle-class democracy in Central America is the rhetoric about the isthmian struggle in this country. The authors have forgotten Abraham Lincoln’s prophecy about being controlled by events rather than controlling them. The U.S. does not dictate the course of history in the Caribbean; events there dictate our reaction. The dog does not wag the tail, the tail wags the dog.
