OPINION|End of Anti-Americanism?

Opinion

ENRIQUE KRAUZE

End of Anti-Americanism?

By Enrique Krauze

 Jan. 7, 2015

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MEXICO CITY — Cuba has been the epicenter of anti-Americanism in modern Latin
America. As a political ideology it was born during the Spanish-American War of 1898,
reached its height with the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and may now, through a
singularly courageous move by President Obama, have begun its final decline.

The agreement to re-establish diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba will
face serious problems: the opposition of conservative American legislators, as well as a
tortuous path toward civil and political liberties in Cuba(the recent detention of bloggers
trying to expand the range of free speech in Cuba is a bad omen). But acclaim for the
agreement is widespread in Latin America. By his historic announcement on Dec. 17, Obama
has begun to dismantle one of the most deeply rooted ideological passions of the southern
continent.

At its distant origins, anti-Americanism had a religious character: a defensive fear on the part
of conservative groups and the Catholic Church directed against the penetration of Protestant
belief and culture. For Mexico there was the added offense of the 1846-48 American war of
territorial aggrandizement. Nevertheless, the Liberals who governed Mexico in the latter half
of the 19th century retained an admiration for the United States. Their republican and
democratic ideas were stronger than their nationalist sentiments. Something of the same
nature was true among progressive elites throughout the continent.

But the war of 1898 united the countries of Hispanic America against the United States and
basically reconciled them with Spain, from which they had — Cuba was one exception —
won their independence. As a result of that war, Latin American liberals experienced
something similar to many Marxists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They felt like orphans,
while various American writers and intellectuals (like Mark Twain and William James)
recognized an irresolvable contradiction between the democratic values on which the United
States was founded and the now explicit intentions (as Henry Cabot Lodge said in 1895) that
“from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Ocean there should be but one flag and one country.”

Many saw the independence of Cuba secured by the war as merely the conversion of a
Spanish colony into an American possession. And it was then that the liberals of Latin
America began to converge with Catholics, other conservative groups and socialists in
forming a Latin American nationalism centered on militant opposition to the United States.

Between 1898 and 1959, with some exceptions, the political, diplomatic and military balance
sheet of the United States in Latin America was nothing short of disastrous. In 1913, the
American ambassador Henry Lane Wilson plotted with Mexican conservatives to overthrow
(and eventually murder) Francisco I. Madero, the first democratically elected president of
Mexico, a grim episode that foreshadowed other abuses: landings of the Marines, occupation
of territory, support for military coups, and the insistent presence of huge American
corporations. In the United States, diplomacy to further the interests of major businesses was
seen as normal; to Latin Americans it was an intolerable display of greed.

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The region reacted with a surge of nationalism, which the conservative American presidents
of the period between the world wars treated as a harbinger of communism. Franklin D.
Roosevelt, with his Good Neighbor Policy, somewhat corrected the mistaken direction of his
predecessors by accepting the Mexican nationalization of its oil resources. But in Cuba, the
connections between politics and American business interests remained unbroken and in plain
sight. (Indeed, during World War II, Pan-American cooperation with the United States
seemed to have its most fertile moment — with the prominent exception of Argentina.)

At the beginning of the Cold War, many Latin American thinkers attributed much of the
region’s poverty and inequality to the presence of American interests and saw socialism,
expressed in various Marxist varieties, as a legitimate alternative. The United States continued
to support authoritarian dictatorships, like the Somoza family business in Nicaragua.
America’s claim to be a fount of democratic values lost its credibility.

In 1947, the liberal Mexican historian Daniel Cosío Villegas predicted: “Latin America will
seethe with unrest and ... they will be capable of anything, of sheltering and supporting the
enemies of the United States and themselves becoming the most bitter of its possible enemies.
And then there will be no way to subdue them, or even to frighten them.”

The Cuban Revolution fulfilled this prophecy and opened a new cycle of intense anti-
Americanism. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress and the conciliatory moves of Jimmy Carter
could not counterbalance the bitterness provoked by Republican administrations. C.I.A.
involvement in the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile or the crimes of the Reagan
administration in the “dirty wars” of Central America incited generations of young Latin
Americans to emulate Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. The ideological hatred of “Yankee
imperialism” became standard in many universities. The rage thus engendered was the most
effective weapon of survival for the repressive and dictatorial Cuban regime.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and, surprisingly, democratic governments came to power
through the ballot box in various Latin American battlegrounds, notably Chile, Nicaragua and
El Salvador. Marxists were orphaned by ideology, and space was opened for liberal and
social-democratic governments.

Anti-Americanism in the region will never disappear, but it is going out of fashion — and
Obama’s decision will certainly further its demise. It had been artificially maintained by the
incendiary histrionics of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. But it has become more difficult to mask
the anachronism of Chavista discourse, directed against the “empire” that is the principal
client for Venezuela’s oil. Only the great obstacle of the American boycott of Cuba has
remained as an outmoded and divisive force.

In re-establishing relations with Cuba, the United States renounces its “imperial destiny” and
recovers much of the moral legitimacy needed to uphold the democratic values that led to its
foundation (and also of the countries of Latin America). Obama’s action is meant for the good
of all the Americas, including the United States. And freedom of expression in Cuba is an
absolute necessity for its success. No people or country is an island unto itself. The Castro
dynasty has kept Cuba as such for 56 years.

Enrique Krauze is a historian, the editor of the literary magazine Letras Libres and the
author of “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America.” This article was translated by
Hank Heifetz from the Spanish.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 8, 2015 in The New York Times International
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