Moisés Naím / Foreign Policy
The change in U.S. policy towards Cuba is neither the most surprising nor the most important outcome of the fifth Summit of the Americas that was recently held in Trinidad. The softening of the U.S. embargo on Cuba would have happened without the summit; reforming U.S. Cuba policy is a process that has been underway for a while and is driven by changes in the international context, changes on the island (notably Fidel Castro’s succession by his brother Raul), and by the emergence of a new political landscape in Washington and especially in south Florida.
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The same weekend that Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez celebrated Mauricio Funes’s election as El Salvador’s new president, his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama. The election in El Salvador and the meeting at the White House are manifestations one of the most important trends that will shape Latin American politics in coming years.
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Is Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez the latest casualty of the global financial crisis? Is the Venezuelan opposition a corrupt, coup-plotting lot that represents the interests of the old regime? Is Venezuela a democracy?
The answers to these questions are as important to the future of Venezuela as the results of the Feb. 15 referendum, in which 54 percent of Venezuelan voters approved a constitutional amendment to eliminate term limits for the president.
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Pope Benedict XVI revoked the excommunication of an Holocaust-denying Bishop; Barack Obama nominated cabinet members that could not be confirmed or, like Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, had fundamental policy disagreements; and people who invested with Bernard Madoff’s lost their money to a scam.
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It is not easy to have such a popular guy in the White House. For too many governments — those of Cuba and Iran, for example — having an easy-to-bash figure in the Oval Office is indispensable. And we all know people for whom anti-Americanism is almost a basic instinct and an automatic inspiration for their political views. Thus, the high approval ratings that Barack Obama enjoys almost everywhere are a very problematic trend for those in need of a U.S. president who can be easily portrayed as one more executor of the deeds of the devilish American empire.
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