By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
BAGHDAD — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. landed in Baghdad on Thursday, beginning a two-day diplomatic mission that he said was intended to “re-establish contact” with Iraqi leaders and prod them toward settling internal disputes over oil revenues and political power-sharing.
Mr. Biden’s surprise trip, just days after American combat forces officially withdrew from Iraqi cities, underscores the concern in the White House about the fragility of the security situation. President Obama has asked Mr. Biden to serve as a kind of unofficial envoy to the country, and the vice president said this would be his first in a series of trips to the region.
The trip is unusually long for such a high-level official; when Mr. Obama visited Iraq, he spent just a few hours here, and President George W. Bush did not spend more than a day. But Mr. Biden said Iraq was at a pivotal moment, “the moment where a lot of Iraqis cynically believed we’d never keep the agreement.” He said the White House wanted to send a message to Iraqi leaders that it was engaged at the highest levels.
Earlier on Thursday, the Iraqi government said it had reached a tentative agreement to buy armaments from France and had signed a series of business deals with French companies to help rebuild Iraq.
The announcements came during a visit to Baghdad by the French prime minister, François Fillon, and about 30 French business executives. In February, President Nicolas Sarkozy visited Baghdad, and in May, Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, traveled to France.
The agreements announced Thursday represent a resumption of the close ties that existed between the French and Iraqi governments during the regime of Saddam Hussein. The relationship was interrupted by the United States-led invasion in 2003, which France opposed.
The contracts call for French companies to build roads, railroads, water treatment plants and a cement factory, as well as an airport south of Baghdad between the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala to accommodate the millions of pilgrims who visit the cities each year.
The arms agreement, announced Thursday in a news release by the Iraqi government, states that the two nations intend to sign contracts to “buy, modernize and repair weapons and military equipment,” and that the French will provide training in the use of the armaments.
The release did not specify what sort of weapons Iraq intended to buy. During the 1970s and 1980s, France was a major supplier of arms to Iraq.
While Mr. Obama has hailed the withdrawal of combat troops as an “important milestone,” he has also expressed concern that the Iraqis are not moving quickly enough to forge a stable government. Just last week, Mr. Obama told reporters, “I haven’t seen as much political progress in Iraq negotiations between the Sunni, the Shia and the Kurds as I would like to see.”
Mr. Biden said he was here to deliver that message in person. “What is their plan to resolve the real differences that exist?” he asked.
But the vice president, who spent years as a senator developing relations with Iraqi officials, must now navigate a thicket of relationships within the Obama administration and avoid stepping on his colleagues’ toes as he takes on the added role of White House point man on Iraq.
Mr. Biden’s visit comes as the relationship between Baghdad and Washington is changing. Mr. Bush took a deeply personal interest in Iraq and conducted regularly scheduled secure video conference calls with Mr. Maliki. But Mr. Obama ended that practice; aides say he thought it more appropriate for his ambassador, Christopher R. Hill, and the top American military commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, to handle such day-to-day contacts.
In putting Mr. Biden in the role of unofficial envoy, Mr. Obama may have recognized that he needed to pay greater attention to Baghdad. Mr. Biden said the job was Mr. Obama’s idea: “The president said, ‘Joe, go do it.’ ”
Mr. Biden is to meet with leaders, including Mr. Maliki, on Friday and celebrate the Fourth of July with troops. His son Beau is a captain in the Army National Guard in Iraq, and aides said the two would probably see each other at some point during the visit.
Like all high-level trips to Iraq, Mr. Biden’s journey was planned in secrecy.
Amir A. al-Obeidi, Riyadh Mohammed and Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.
Jul 3, 2009
For Hispanic Firefighter in New Haven Bias Suit, Awkward Position but Firm Resolve
By A. G. SULZBERGER
NEW HAVEN — The two dozen firefighters who packed into Humphrey’s East Restaurant were celebrating a coming marriage, drinking and jawboning in the boisterous style of large men with risky jobs, but Lt. Ben Vargas spent the evening trying to escape the tension surrounding his presence.
During a trip to the bathroom, he found himself facing another man. Without warning, the first punch landed. When Lieutenant Vargas awoke, bloodied and splayed on the grimy floor, he was taken to the hospital.
Lieutenant Vargas believes the attack, five years ago, was orchestrated by a black firefighter in retaliation for his having joined a racial discrimination lawsuit against the city over its tossing out of an exam for promotion that few minority firefighters passed. (No arrests were made in the attack, and the black firefighter vigorously denies having been involved.)
When the Hispanic firefighters’ association and its members — including Lieutenant Vargas’s brother — refused to publicly stand behind him, he quit the organization.
Lieutenant Vargas, who posted the sixth-highest score on the exam, was ridiculed as a token, a turncoat and an Uncle Tom — all of which, he said, “made my resolve that much stronger.”
When the United States Supreme Court ruled this week in the firefighters’ favor, Lieutenant Vargas, 40, the son of Puerto Rican parents, found himself celebrating amid an awkward racial dynamic: As the lone Hispanic among the 18 plaintiffs who had challenged an affirmative action policy, he had also challenged an appeals court decision joined by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court.
“She’s from Puerto Rico, and I’m from Puerto Rico,” he said. “She obviously feels differently than I do.”
The Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision is expected to have repercussions on employment discrimination law that go well beyond fire departments, where minority groups have been woefully underrepresented, particularly in leadership positions. On the steps of the federal courthouse in New Haven on Monday, a lawyer for the firefighters, Karen Lee Torre, said they had “become a symbol for millions of Americans who have grown tired of seeing individual achievement and merit take a back seat to race and ethnicity.”
For Lieutenant Vargas, the ruling will probably mean a long-awaited promotion to captain in a 350-member department that he has admired since childhood but that has been plagued for decades by racial tension and recriminations.
“I consider myself an American — I was born and raised here,” he said in an interview on the porch of his home in the wooded suburb of Wallingford. “I love my people. I love my culture. I love our rice and beans, our salsa music, our language — everything my parents raised us with. But I am so grateful for the opportunity only the United States can give.”
He grew up in the troubled Fair Haven neighborhood of New Haven, a complicated city known for Yale University but also for urban decay, high crime rates and failed prospects, roots he sees as similar to Judge Sotomayor’s in a Bronx public housing project.
His father was a factory worker, and his mother took care of the couple’s three children. (In addition to his brother, David, who did not respond to interview requests, he has a sister who now lives in Puerto Rico.) The family spoke Spanish at home, making his adjustment to school “traumatic,” he said.
Lieutenant Vargas decided to follow the path of an older friend, John Marquez, whom he looked up to. Mr. Marquez had worked his way out of the neighborhood by joining the Fire Department.
“I used to tell him, ‘You know where I came from — if I can make it, anyone can,’ ” Mr. Marquez, now a deputy chief in the department, said in an interview. “ ‘But don’t expect anything to be handed to you. Work for it.’ ”
But Lieutenant Vargas’s aspirations were stymied by a 1988 lawsuit, filed by black firefighters, that shut down hiring for years. The lawsuit challenged a written test that relatively few nonwhites passed. In 1994, the city agreed to disregard the test, over union complaints, and hire 40 firefighters — 20 white, 10 black and 10 Hispanic, according to The New Haven Register.
Lieutenant Vargas was among those hired. That later led some people to criticize him as trying to shut the door that welcomed him, though he maintained that it was impossible to know how he would have done under the old hiring process.
He was promoted to lieutenant in 2000, and he now leads a four-person crew at a red-brick single-engine firehouse not far from where he grew up. He also works part time as a consultant for a company that sells equipment for firefighters.
“When I leave the firehouse, I bring it home with me,” he said. “I read about it. Think about it. I love this job. I don’t think there’s anything else I could do better.”
In 2003, Lieutenant Vargas was one of 56 people in the department who passed a test for promotion; 15 were black or Hispanic. When city officials discovered that only two of those were likely to be immediately promoted, they decided to throw out the test, citing concerns that minority candidates might again sue, alleging discrimination.
Instead, a group of white firefighters sued. The results had been posted by race, without names, and when Lieutenant Vargas learned that a Hispanic firefighter had scored sixth among 41 lieutenants on the test to become a captain, he joined the suit. Only later did he discover that the score was his.
“I would have carried the load all by myself,” he said of filing the suit. “Luckily there were enough people out there who felt like I did that we could stand together.”
But Lieutenant Vargas bore more than his share of the criticism, said Lt. Matthew Marcarelli, who was among the plaintiffs and has known Lieutenant Vargas since they were classmates at the fire academy. “Why the other guys viewed him as a turncoat I really don’t understand. He did it because he’s principled and he thought it was the right thing to do. Benny’s nobody’s token.”
Chief Marquez said his old protégé was “an easy target because he didn’t fall in line.”
“It seems that if you’re not the right type of minority, you get hammered,” he said.
The president of the black firefighters’ group in New Haven did not return calls seeking comment.
Despite the ugly episode at Humphrey’s East shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Lieutenant Vargas said that little tension remained in the department, and that he was hopeful that the court decision would end the rest.
He noted that the Hispanic firefighters’ association reversed course in February, after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and publicly endorsed his position.
Gesturing toward his three young sons, Lieutenant Vargas explained why he had no regrets. “I want them to have a fair shake, to get a job on their merits and not because they’re Hispanic or they fill a quota,” he said. “What a lousy way to live.”
NEW HAVEN — The two dozen firefighters who packed into Humphrey’s East Restaurant were celebrating a coming marriage, drinking and jawboning in the boisterous style of large men with risky jobs, but Lt. Ben Vargas spent the evening trying to escape the tension surrounding his presence.
During a trip to the bathroom, he found himself facing another man. Without warning, the first punch landed. When Lieutenant Vargas awoke, bloodied and splayed on the grimy floor, he was taken to the hospital.
Lieutenant Vargas believes the attack, five years ago, was orchestrated by a black firefighter in retaliation for his having joined a racial discrimination lawsuit against the city over its tossing out of an exam for promotion that few minority firefighters passed. (No arrests were made in the attack, and the black firefighter vigorously denies having been involved.)
When the Hispanic firefighters’ association and its members — including Lieutenant Vargas’s brother — refused to publicly stand behind him, he quit the organization.
Lieutenant Vargas, who posted the sixth-highest score on the exam, was ridiculed as a token, a turncoat and an Uncle Tom — all of which, he said, “made my resolve that much stronger.”
When the United States Supreme Court ruled this week in the firefighters’ favor, Lieutenant Vargas, 40, the son of Puerto Rican parents, found himself celebrating amid an awkward racial dynamic: As the lone Hispanic among the 18 plaintiffs who had challenged an affirmative action policy, he had also challenged an appeals court decision joined by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic nominee to the Supreme Court.
“She’s from Puerto Rico, and I’m from Puerto Rico,” he said. “She obviously feels differently than I do.”
The Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision is expected to have repercussions on employment discrimination law that go well beyond fire departments, where minority groups have been woefully underrepresented, particularly in leadership positions. On the steps of the federal courthouse in New Haven on Monday, a lawyer for the firefighters, Karen Lee Torre, said they had “become a symbol for millions of Americans who have grown tired of seeing individual achievement and merit take a back seat to race and ethnicity.”
For Lieutenant Vargas, the ruling will probably mean a long-awaited promotion to captain in a 350-member department that he has admired since childhood but that has been plagued for decades by racial tension and recriminations.
“I consider myself an American — I was born and raised here,” he said in an interview on the porch of his home in the wooded suburb of Wallingford. “I love my people. I love my culture. I love our rice and beans, our salsa music, our language — everything my parents raised us with. But I am so grateful for the opportunity only the United States can give.”
He grew up in the troubled Fair Haven neighborhood of New Haven, a complicated city known for Yale University but also for urban decay, high crime rates and failed prospects, roots he sees as similar to Judge Sotomayor’s in a Bronx public housing project.
His father was a factory worker, and his mother took care of the couple’s three children. (In addition to his brother, David, who did not respond to interview requests, he has a sister who now lives in Puerto Rico.) The family spoke Spanish at home, making his adjustment to school “traumatic,” he said.
Lieutenant Vargas decided to follow the path of an older friend, John Marquez, whom he looked up to. Mr. Marquez had worked his way out of the neighborhood by joining the Fire Department.
“I used to tell him, ‘You know where I came from — if I can make it, anyone can,’ ” Mr. Marquez, now a deputy chief in the department, said in an interview. “ ‘But don’t expect anything to be handed to you. Work for it.’ ”
But Lieutenant Vargas’s aspirations were stymied by a 1988 lawsuit, filed by black firefighters, that shut down hiring for years. The lawsuit challenged a written test that relatively few nonwhites passed. In 1994, the city agreed to disregard the test, over union complaints, and hire 40 firefighters — 20 white, 10 black and 10 Hispanic, according to The New Haven Register.
Lieutenant Vargas was among those hired. That later led some people to criticize him as trying to shut the door that welcomed him, though he maintained that it was impossible to know how he would have done under the old hiring process.
He was promoted to lieutenant in 2000, and he now leads a four-person crew at a red-brick single-engine firehouse not far from where he grew up. He also works part time as a consultant for a company that sells equipment for firefighters.
“When I leave the firehouse, I bring it home with me,” he said. “I read about it. Think about it. I love this job. I don’t think there’s anything else I could do better.”
In 2003, Lieutenant Vargas was one of 56 people in the department who passed a test for promotion; 15 were black or Hispanic. When city officials discovered that only two of those were likely to be immediately promoted, they decided to throw out the test, citing concerns that minority candidates might again sue, alleging discrimination.
Instead, a group of white firefighters sued. The results had been posted by race, without names, and when Lieutenant Vargas learned that a Hispanic firefighter had scored sixth among 41 lieutenants on the test to become a captain, he joined the suit. Only later did he discover that the score was his.
“I would have carried the load all by myself,” he said of filing the suit. “Luckily there were enough people out there who felt like I did that we could stand together.”
But Lieutenant Vargas bore more than his share of the criticism, said Lt. Matthew Marcarelli, who was among the plaintiffs and has known Lieutenant Vargas since they were classmates at the fire academy. “Why the other guys viewed him as a turncoat I really don’t understand. He did it because he’s principled and he thought it was the right thing to do. Benny’s nobody’s token.”
Chief Marquez said his old protégé was “an easy target because he didn’t fall in line.”
“It seems that if you’re not the right type of minority, you get hammered,” he said.
The president of the black firefighters’ group in New Haven did not return calls seeking comment.
Despite the ugly episode at Humphrey’s East shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Lieutenant Vargas said that little tension remained in the department, and that he was hopeful that the court decision would end the rest.
He noted that the Hispanic firefighters’ association reversed course in February, after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and publicly endorsed his position.
Gesturing toward his three young sons, Lieutenant Vargas explained why he had no regrets. “I want them to have a fair shake, to get a job on their merits and not because they’re Hispanic or they fill a quota,” he said. “What a lousy way to live.”
U.S. Shifts Strategy on Illicit Work by Immigrants
By JULIA PRESTON
Immigration authorities had bad news this week for American Apparel, the T-shirt maker based in downtown Los Angeles: About 1,800 of its employees appeared to be illegal immigrants not authorized to work in the United States.
But in contrast to the high-profile raids that marked the enforcement approach of the Bush administration, no federal agents with criminal warrants stormed the company’s factories and rounded up employees. Instead, the federal immigration agency sent American Apparel a written notice that it faced civil fines and would have to fire any workers confirmed to be unauthorized.
The treatment of American Apparel, which has more than 5,600 factory employees in Los Angeles alone, is the most prominent demonstration of a new strategy by the Obama administration to curb the employment of illegal immigrants by focusing on employers who hire them — and doing so in a less confrontational manner than in years past.
Unlike the approach of the Bush administration, which brought criminal charges in its final two years against many illegal immigrant workers, the new effort makes broader use of fines and other civil sanctions, federal officials said Thursday.
Federal agents will concentrate on businesses employing large numbers of workers suspected of being illegal immigrants, the officials said, and will reserve tough criminal charges mostly for employers who serially hire illegal immigrants and engage in wage and labor violations.
“These actions underscore our commitment to targeting employers that cultivate illegal work forces by knowingly hiring and exploiting illegal workers,” said Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
On Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency known as ICE, said it had sent notices announcing audits of hiring records, like the one it conducted at American Apparel, to 652 other companies across the country. Officials said they were picking up the pace of such audits, after performing 503 of them in 2008.
The names of other companies that received notices have not been made public. American Apparel became a window into the new enforcement tactics because, as a publicly traded company, it issued a required notice on Wednesday about the hiring audit.
The Obama administration’s new approach, unveiled in April, seems to be moving away from the raids that advocates for immigrants said had split families, disrupted businesses and traumatized communities. But the outcome will still be difficult for illegal workers, who will lose their jobs and could face deportation, the advocates said.
Immigration officials have not made clear how they intend to deal with workers who are unable to prove their legal immigration status in the course of inspections, but they said there was no moratorium on deportations.
Executives at American Apparel were both relieved and dismayed after receiving the warning from the immigration agency of discrepancies in the hiring documents of about one-third of its Los Angeles work force. The company has 30 days to dispute the agency’s claims and give immigrant employees time to prove that they are authorized to work in the United States, immigration officials said. If they cannot, the company must fire them, probably within two months.
But no criminal charges were lodged against the company and no workers have been arrested, American Apparel executives and immigration officials said.
The fines followed discussions over 18 months between federal officials and American Apparel, after immigration agents first inspected the company’s files in January 2008, said Peter Schey, an immigration lawyer representing the company. Mr. Schey said a raid had been averted because the company cooperated with the audit and because immigration agents had not found any labor abuses.
“There is no evidence of any exploitation of workers or violation of labor laws,” he said. “And there is not a single allegation that the company knowingly hired an undocumented worker.”
American Apparel and its outspoken chief executive, Dov Charney, have waged a campaign, emblazoned on T-shirts sold across the country, criticizing the immigration crackdown of recent years and calling on Congress to “Legalize L.A.” by granting legal status to illegal immigrants.
Most garment workers in American Apparel’s huge shop in Los Angeles work directly for the company, not for subcontractors, its records show. They earn at least $10 to $12 an hour, well above minimum wage, and receive health benefits.
At a news conference last year, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles publicly lauded Mr. Charney for helping the city with its faltering economy by providing “the dream of a steady paycheck and good benefits for countless workers.”
While it has been no secret that American Apparel’s largely Latino work force probably included many illegal immigrants, Mr. Schey said the company had been careful to meet legal hiring requirements. Many illegal immigrants use convincingly forged Social Security cards or other fake documents when seeking work.
In a statement, Mr. Charney said that many of his workers cited by the immigration agency were “responsible, hard-working employees” who had been with the company for more than a decade. Mr. Charney, an immigrant from Canada, said he hoped they would be able to prove their legal status. But because of the recession, the company said, it will not be hurt financially if it has to replace them.
Mr. Schey said the hiring audit at American Apparel had been “professionally done.” By contrast, Mr. Schey has brought more than 100 damage claims against the immigration agency on behalf of American citizens who said they were illegally arrested last year in Los Angeles in an immigration raid at a different company, Micro Solutions Enterprises.
Immigration officials, who asked not to be identified because the case is continuing, said the fines to American Apparel so far were about $150,000.
Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, said it had taken steps to limit negotiations with employers that in the past had resulted in steep reductions in fines the employers ultimately paid.
Representative Brian P. Bilbray, a California Republican who heads an immigration caucus in the House, said the amount of the fines was crucial.
“If this is a truly conscientious effort to get tough with employers to say the days are over of profiteering with illegal immigrants, that’s fine,” said Mr. Bilbray, who opposes any effort to give legal status to illegal immigrants. “But if the fine will be so low that it’s just part of doing business, there’s no deterrent.”
Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, an advocacy group, said she welcomed the end to “showboat enforcement raids.” But in the end, Ms. Salas said, “there is still enforcement of laws that are broken,” adding, “The workers will still lose their jobs.”
Immigration authorities had bad news this week for American Apparel, the T-shirt maker based in downtown Los Angeles: About 1,800 of its employees appeared to be illegal immigrants not authorized to work in the United States.
But in contrast to the high-profile raids that marked the enforcement approach of the Bush administration, no federal agents with criminal warrants stormed the company’s factories and rounded up employees. Instead, the federal immigration agency sent American Apparel a written notice that it faced civil fines and would have to fire any workers confirmed to be unauthorized.
The treatment of American Apparel, which has more than 5,600 factory employees in Los Angeles alone, is the most prominent demonstration of a new strategy by the Obama administration to curb the employment of illegal immigrants by focusing on employers who hire them — and doing so in a less confrontational manner than in years past.
Unlike the approach of the Bush administration, which brought criminal charges in its final two years against many illegal immigrant workers, the new effort makes broader use of fines and other civil sanctions, federal officials said Thursday.
Federal agents will concentrate on businesses employing large numbers of workers suspected of being illegal immigrants, the officials said, and will reserve tough criminal charges mostly for employers who serially hire illegal immigrants and engage in wage and labor violations.
“These actions underscore our commitment to targeting employers that cultivate illegal work forces by knowingly hiring and exploiting illegal workers,” said Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
On Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency known as ICE, said it had sent notices announcing audits of hiring records, like the one it conducted at American Apparel, to 652 other companies across the country. Officials said they were picking up the pace of such audits, after performing 503 of them in 2008.
The names of other companies that received notices have not been made public. American Apparel became a window into the new enforcement tactics because, as a publicly traded company, it issued a required notice on Wednesday about the hiring audit.
The Obama administration’s new approach, unveiled in April, seems to be moving away from the raids that advocates for immigrants said had split families, disrupted businesses and traumatized communities. But the outcome will still be difficult for illegal workers, who will lose their jobs and could face deportation, the advocates said.
Immigration officials have not made clear how they intend to deal with workers who are unable to prove their legal immigration status in the course of inspections, but they said there was no moratorium on deportations.
Executives at American Apparel were both relieved and dismayed after receiving the warning from the immigration agency of discrepancies in the hiring documents of about one-third of its Los Angeles work force. The company has 30 days to dispute the agency’s claims and give immigrant employees time to prove that they are authorized to work in the United States, immigration officials said. If they cannot, the company must fire them, probably within two months.
But no criminal charges were lodged against the company and no workers have been arrested, American Apparel executives and immigration officials said.
The fines followed discussions over 18 months between federal officials and American Apparel, after immigration agents first inspected the company’s files in January 2008, said Peter Schey, an immigration lawyer representing the company. Mr. Schey said a raid had been averted because the company cooperated with the audit and because immigration agents had not found any labor abuses.
“There is no evidence of any exploitation of workers or violation of labor laws,” he said. “And there is not a single allegation that the company knowingly hired an undocumented worker.”
American Apparel and its outspoken chief executive, Dov Charney, have waged a campaign, emblazoned on T-shirts sold across the country, criticizing the immigration crackdown of recent years and calling on Congress to “Legalize L.A.” by granting legal status to illegal immigrants.
Most garment workers in American Apparel’s huge shop in Los Angeles work directly for the company, not for subcontractors, its records show. They earn at least $10 to $12 an hour, well above minimum wage, and receive health benefits.
At a news conference last year, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles publicly lauded Mr. Charney for helping the city with its faltering economy by providing “the dream of a steady paycheck and good benefits for countless workers.”
While it has been no secret that American Apparel’s largely Latino work force probably included many illegal immigrants, Mr. Schey said the company had been careful to meet legal hiring requirements. Many illegal immigrants use convincingly forged Social Security cards or other fake documents when seeking work.
In a statement, Mr. Charney said that many of his workers cited by the immigration agency were “responsible, hard-working employees” who had been with the company for more than a decade. Mr. Charney, an immigrant from Canada, said he hoped they would be able to prove their legal status. But because of the recession, the company said, it will not be hurt financially if it has to replace them.
Mr. Schey said the hiring audit at American Apparel had been “professionally done.” By contrast, Mr. Schey has brought more than 100 damage claims against the immigration agency on behalf of American citizens who said they were illegally arrested last year in Los Angeles in an immigration raid at a different company, Micro Solutions Enterprises.
Immigration officials, who asked not to be identified because the case is continuing, said the fines to American Apparel so far were about $150,000.
Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, said it had taken steps to limit negotiations with employers that in the past had resulted in steep reductions in fines the employers ultimately paid.
Representative Brian P. Bilbray, a California Republican who heads an immigration caucus in the House, said the amount of the fines was crucial.
“If this is a truly conscientious effort to get tough with employers to say the days are over of profiteering with illegal immigrants, that’s fine,” said Mr. Bilbray, who opposes any effort to give legal status to illegal immigrants. “But if the fine will be so low that it’s just part of doing business, there’s no deterrent.”
Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, an advocacy group, said she welcomed the end to “showboat enforcement raids.” But in the end, Ms. Salas said, “there is still enforcement of laws that are broken,” adding, “The workers will still lose their jobs.”
U.S. Faces Resentment in Afghan Region
By CARLOTTA GALL
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — The mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt in some parts of southern Afghanistan, presenting incoming American forces with an even harder job than expected in reversing military losses to the Taliban and winning over the population.
Villagers in some districts have taken up arms against foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger after losing relatives in airstrikes, several community representatives interviewed said. Others have been moved to join the insurgents out of poverty or simply because the Taliban’s influence is so pervasive here.
On Thursday morning, 4,000 American Marines began a major offensive to try to take back the region from the strongest Taliban insurgency in the country. The Marines are part of a larger deployment of additional troops being ordered by the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, to concentrate not just on killing Taliban fighters but on protecting the population.
Yet Taliban control of the countryside is so extensive in provinces like Kandahar and Helmand that winning districts back will involve tough fighting and may ignite further tensions, residents and local officials warn. The government has no presence in 5 of Helmand’s 13 districts, and in several others, like Nawa, it holds only the district town, where troops and officials live virtually under siege.
The Taliban’s influence is so strong in rural areas that much of the local population has accepted their rule and is watching the United States troop buildup with trepidation. Villagers interviewed in late June said that they preferred to be left alone under Taliban rule and complained about artillery fire and airstrikes by foreign forces.
“We Muslims don’t like them — they are the source of danger,” said a local villager, Hajji Taj Muhammad, of the foreign forces. His house in Marja, a town west of this provincial capital that has been a major opium trading post and Taliban base, was bombed two months ago, he said.
The southern provinces have suffered the worst civilian casualties since NATO’s deployment to the region in 2006. Thousands of people have already been displaced by fighting and taken refuge in the towns.
“Now there are more people siding with the Taliban than with the government,” said Abdul Qadir Noorzai, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in southern Afghanistan.
In many places, people have never seen or felt the presence of the Afghan government, or foreign forces, except through violence, but the Taliban are a known quantity, community leaders said.
“People are hostages of the Taliban, but they look at the coalition also as the enemy, because they have not seen anything good from them in seven or eight years,” said Hajji Abdul Ahad Helmandwal, a district council leader from Nadali in Helmand Province.
Foreign troops continue to make mistakes that enrage whole sections of this deeply tribal society, like the killing of a tribal elder’s son and his wife as they were driving to their home in Helmand two months ago. Only their baby daughter survived. The tribal elder, Reis-e-Baghran, a former member of the Taliban who reconciled with the government, is one of the most influential figures in Helmand.
The infusion of more American troops into southern Afghanistan is aimed at ending a stalemate between NATO and Taliban forces. The governor of Helmand, Gulab Mangal, said extra forces were needed since the Taliban were now so entrenched in the region that they had permanent bases.
Last year an American Marine Expeditionary Unit of 2,400 men secured a small but critical area in the district of Garmser in southern Helmand, choking off Taliban supply routes from the Pakistani border while reopening the town for commerce. The operation had a crippling effect on Taliban forces operating farther north in neighboring Oruzgan Province, according to Jelani Popal, who oversees local affairs for President Hamid Karzai’s government.
This year military officials hope to replicate that operation in more places, according to Lt. Gen. James Dutton, the British deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The extra forces will be critical to create confidence among the locals and persuade insurgents to give up the fight, said Mr. Mangal, the Helmand governor. Yet he and others warn that there will be more bloodshed and that the large influx of foreign forces could prompt a backlash.
In parts of Helmand and Kandahar, resentment and frustration are rampant. People who traveled to Lashkar Gah from the districts complained of continued civilian suffering and questioned American intentions. “They come here just to fight, not to bring peace,” said Allah Nazad, a farmer.
People from Marja said that foreign troops carrying out counternarcotics operations conducted nighttime raids on houses, sometimes killed people inside their homes, and used dogs that bit the occupants.
“The people are very scared of the night raids,” said Spin Gul, a local farmer. “When they have night raids, the people join the Taliban and fight.”
“Who are the Taliban? They are local people,” interjected another man, who did not give his name. One man, Hamza, said he would fight if foreigners raided his house. “I will not allow them,” he said. “I will fight them to the last drop of blood.”
Many do not side with the Taliban out of choice, however, and could be won over, community leaders said.
Fazel Muhammad, a member of the district council of Panjwai, an area west of Kandahar, said he knew people who were laying mines for the Taliban in order to feed their families. He estimated that 80 percent of insurgents were local people driven to fight out of poverty and despair. Offered another way out, only 2 percent would support the Taliban, he said.
Yet mistrust of the government remains so strong that even if the Taliban were defeated militarily, the government and the American-led coalition would find the population reluctant to cooperate, said Hajji Abdullah Jan, the leader of the provincial council of Helmand. “These people will still not trust the government,” he said. “Even if security is 100 percent, it will take time because the government did not keep its promises in the past.”
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — The mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt in some parts of southern Afghanistan, presenting incoming American forces with an even harder job than expected in reversing military losses to the Taliban and winning over the population.
Villagers in some districts have taken up arms against foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger after losing relatives in airstrikes, several community representatives interviewed said. Others have been moved to join the insurgents out of poverty or simply because the Taliban’s influence is so pervasive here.
On Thursday morning, 4,000 American Marines began a major offensive to try to take back the region from the strongest Taliban insurgency in the country. The Marines are part of a larger deployment of additional troops being ordered by the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, to concentrate not just on killing Taliban fighters but on protecting the population.
Yet Taliban control of the countryside is so extensive in provinces like Kandahar and Helmand that winning districts back will involve tough fighting and may ignite further tensions, residents and local officials warn. The government has no presence in 5 of Helmand’s 13 districts, and in several others, like Nawa, it holds only the district town, where troops and officials live virtually under siege.
The Taliban’s influence is so strong in rural areas that much of the local population has accepted their rule and is watching the United States troop buildup with trepidation. Villagers interviewed in late June said that they preferred to be left alone under Taliban rule and complained about artillery fire and airstrikes by foreign forces.
“We Muslims don’t like them — they are the source of danger,” said a local villager, Hajji Taj Muhammad, of the foreign forces. His house in Marja, a town west of this provincial capital that has been a major opium trading post and Taliban base, was bombed two months ago, he said.
The southern provinces have suffered the worst civilian casualties since NATO’s deployment to the region in 2006. Thousands of people have already been displaced by fighting and taken refuge in the towns.
“Now there are more people siding with the Taliban than with the government,” said Abdul Qadir Noorzai, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in southern Afghanistan.
In many places, people have never seen or felt the presence of the Afghan government, or foreign forces, except through violence, but the Taliban are a known quantity, community leaders said.
“People are hostages of the Taliban, but they look at the coalition also as the enemy, because they have not seen anything good from them in seven or eight years,” said Hajji Abdul Ahad Helmandwal, a district council leader from Nadali in Helmand Province.
Foreign troops continue to make mistakes that enrage whole sections of this deeply tribal society, like the killing of a tribal elder’s son and his wife as they were driving to their home in Helmand two months ago. Only their baby daughter survived. The tribal elder, Reis-e-Baghran, a former member of the Taliban who reconciled with the government, is one of the most influential figures in Helmand.
The infusion of more American troops into southern Afghanistan is aimed at ending a stalemate between NATO and Taliban forces. The governor of Helmand, Gulab Mangal, said extra forces were needed since the Taliban were now so entrenched in the region that they had permanent bases.
Last year an American Marine Expeditionary Unit of 2,400 men secured a small but critical area in the district of Garmser in southern Helmand, choking off Taliban supply routes from the Pakistani border while reopening the town for commerce. The operation had a crippling effect on Taliban forces operating farther north in neighboring Oruzgan Province, according to Jelani Popal, who oversees local affairs for President Hamid Karzai’s government.
This year military officials hope to replicate that operation in more places, according to Lt. Gen. James Dutton, the British deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The extra forces will be critical to create confidence among the locals and persuade insurgents to give up the fight, said Mr. Mangal, the Helmand governor. Yet he and others warn that there will be more bloodshed and that the large influx of foreign forces could prompt a backlash.
In parts of Helmand and Kandahar, resentment and frustration are rampant. People who traveled to Lashkar Gah from the districts complained of continued civilian suffering and questioned American intentions. “They come here just to fight, not to bring peace,” said Allah Nazad, a farmer.
People from Marja said that foreign troops carrying out counternarcotics operations conducted nighttime raids on houses, sometimes killed people inside their homes, and used dogs that bit the occupants.
“The people are very scared of the night raids,” said Spin Gul, a local farmer. “When they have night raids, the people join the Taliban and fight.”
“Who are the Taliban? They are local people,” interjected another man, who did not give his name. One man, Hamza, said he would fight if foreigners raided his house. “I will not allow them,” he said. “I will fight them to the last drop of blood.”
Many do not side with the Taliban out of choice, however, and could be won over, community leaders said.
Fazel Muhammad, a member of the district council of Panjwai, an area west of Kandahar, said he knew people who were laying mines for the Taliban in order to feed their families. He estimated that 80 percent of insurgents were local people driven to fight out of poverty and despair. Offered another way out, only 2 percent would support the Taliban, he said.
Yet mistrust of the government remains so strong that even if the Taliban were defeated militarily, the government and the American-led coalition would find the population reluctant to cooperate, said Hajji Abdullah Jan, the leader of the provincial council of Helmand. “These people will still not trust the government,” he said. “Even if security is 100 percent, it will take time because the government did not keep its promises in the past.”
Jobless Rate Climbs to 9.5%, Deflating Recovery Hopes
By PETER S. GOODMAN
The American economy lost 467,000 more jobs in June, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the longest recession since the 1930s had yet to release its hold.
“The numbers are indicative of a continued, very severe recession,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh. “There’s nothing in here to show that the economy and the market are pulling out of the grip of recession.”
The Labor Department’s monthly snapshot of employment, released Thursday, challenged visions of a recovery already taking root. The numbers intensify pressure on the Obama administration to show returns on programs aimed at improving national fortunes — not least its $787 billion stimulus plan.
Some economists are now calling for another dose of government spending to stimulate the economy, though the White House maintains that enough money is in the pipeline already.
“Not all the recovery money has been put to work yet,” said the labor secretary, Hilda L. Solis. “We’re making progress.”
But Ms. Solis acknowledged that joblessness was already much worse than the administration projected in January when it created its stimulus spending bill, suggesting then that joblessness would peak at about 8 percent.
Asked why the unemployment rate is already much higher, Ms. Solis noted that much of the stimulus money was moving slowly, with construction projects in particular requiring time-consuming government permits.
“Over all, it’s been a challenge,” Ms. Solis said. “We still have a ways to go.”
That explanation echoed criticism that some initially leveled at the spending package when it was debated in Congress: many of the projects would take too long to get going, creating too few jobs in the near term. Still, Ms. Solis portrayed the program as a success.
“We would have done much worse had we not put the recovery plan in place,” she said.
In recent weeks, positive signs have emerged that automakers are beginning to see stronger sales, factories are gaining more orders, and housing prices have stopped falling in some markets. But the jobs report injected the sense that paychecks are disappearing so swiftly that consumer spending is likely to be tight, limiting economic activity. The gloomy news caused the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index to tumble more than 2 percent.
Indeed, the report reinforced a consensus that high levels of unemployment are likely to afflict American life for many months and perhaps much longer. That will dump more jobless people into a weak job market, making it harder for those already unemployed to find work and pressing down wages and hours.
After a May report that showed the pace of deterioration was moderating, some economists expressed hopes that an economic recovery might finally be emerging. But the June report tempered such thoughts.
For another month, manufacturing jobs disappeared, dipping by 136,000, while construction jobs shrank by 79,000 and retail by 21,000. Health care remained a rare bright spot, adding 21,000.
The losses for June lifted net jobs shed since the beginning of the recession to 6.5 million — equal to the net job gain over the previous nine years.
“This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle,” Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said in a research note. She called this fact “a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000 to 2007.”
The June figures did show continued slowing in the pace of job losses. From November to March — after the collapse of some prominent financial institutions — the labor market lost an average of 670,000 jobs each month. From April to June, the decline slowed to 436,000 a month.
The Obama administration seized on those numbers to argue that its stimulus spending plan was gradually working.
“We’re seeing a kind of leveling off here,” said Ms. Solis, the labor secretary.
Some economists contend that a recovery is indeed in its early stages, cautioning that the job market tends to lag behind progress in other areas.
Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the research and trading firm MKM Partners, pointed to a recent rally in the corporate bond market as a sign that normalcy was returning to the financial system. He asserted that this presaged the resumption of economic growth in the second half of this year and vigorous activity next year.
“The labor market is going to lag the recovery process to a certain degree,” he said.
But other experts argued that employment was a more crucial source of spending power than in downturns past, given how many alternate sources of cash had been lost.
Consumer spending amounts to 70 percent of overall American economic activity. In recent times, Americans found myriad ways to fuel spending even as incomes for many households stagnated, borrowing against the once-rising value of homes and tapping credit cards.
Now, the paycheck has returned as the primary source of spending. Yet pay is eroding even for those who have jobs.
The average workweek for rank-and-file employees in the private sector — roughly 80 percent of the work force — slipped by a fraction to 33 hours, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data in 1964.
The so-called underemployment rate — which captures not only the jobless but also those working part time because their hours have been cut or they cannot find a full-time job — increased to 16.5 percent.
Some economists contend that while unemployment remains high, millions of Americans will continue to watch their spending.
“It looks really bad,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “There are no green shoots here. People can’t spend when they don’t have the money.”
For another month, the average length of official unemployment increased, this time to 24.5 weeks — the highest level since the government began tracking such data in 1948. The unemployment rate, 9.5 percent, is the highest since 1983.
Layoffs have slowed in recent months, but hiring has yet to pick up, meaning that jobless people face a more frustrating search.
In the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Jeffrey Jones, 40, has found no work since losing his job as a cook at a senior center in October. He worries about paying rent and caring for his four children.
“I know I’m not supposed to be letting it stress me out,” he said. “The way I’m going now, I won’t be able to make it too much longer. I can’t go this long without doing something for my family.”
Jack Healy contributed reporting.
The American economy lost 467,000 more jobs in June, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the longest recession since the 1930s had yet to release its hold.
“The numbers are indicative of a continued, very severe recession,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh. “There’s nothing in here to show that the economy and the market are pulling out of the grip of recession.”
The Labor Department’s monthly snapshot of employment, released Thursday, challenged visions of a recovery already taking root. The numbers intensify pressure on the Obama administration to show returns on programs aimed at improving national fortunes — not least its $787 billion stimulus plan.
Some economists are now calling for another dose of government spending to stimulate the economy, though the White House maintains that enough money is in the pipeline already.
“Not all the recovery money has been put to work yet,” said the labor secretary, Hilda L. Solis. “We’re making progress.”
But Ms. Solis acknowledged that joblessness was already much worse than the administration projected in January when it created its stimulus spending bill, suggesting then that joblessness would peak at about 8 percent.
Asked why the unemployment rate is already much higher, Ms. Solis noted that much of the stimulus money was moving slowly, with construction projects in particular requiring time-consuming government permits.
“Over all, it’s been a challenge,” Ms. Solis said. “We still have a ways to go.”
That explanation echoed criticism that some initially leveled at the spending package when it was debated in Congress: many of the projects would take too long to get going, creating too few jobs in the near term. Still, Ms. Solis portrayed the program as a success.
“We would have done much worse had we not put the recovery plan in place,” she said.
In recent weeks, positive signs have emerged that automakers are beginning to see stronger sales, factories are gaining more orders, and housing prices have stopped falling in some markets. But the jobs report injected the sense that paychecks are disappearing so swiftly that consumer spending is likely to be tight, limiting economic activity. The gloomy news caused the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index to tumble more than 2 percent.
Indeed, the report reinforced a consensus that high levels of unemployment are likely to afflict American life for many months and perhaps much longer. That will dump more jobless people into a weak job market, making it harder for those already unemployed to find work and pressing down wages and hours.
After a May report that showed the pace of deterioration was moderating, some economists expressed hopes that an economic recovery might finally be emerging. But the June report tempered such thoughts.
For another month, manufacturing jobs disappeared, dipping by 136,000, while construction jobs shrank by 79,000 and retail by 21,000. Health care remained a rare bright spot, adding 21,000.
The losses for June lifted net jobs shed since the beginning of the recession to 6.5 million — equal to the net job gain over the previous nine years.
“This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle,” Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said in a research note. She called this fact “a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000 to 2007.”
The June figures did show continued slowing in the pace of job losses. From November to March — after the collapse of some prominent financial institutions — the labor market lost an average of 670,000 jobs each month. From April to June, the decline slowed to 436,000 a month.
The Obama administration seized on those numbers to argue that its stimulus spending plan was gradually working.
“We’re seeing a kind of leveling off here,” said Ms. Solis, the labor secretary.
Some economists contend that a recovery is indeed in its early stages, cautioning that the job market tends to lag behind progress in other areas.
Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the research and trading firm MKM Partners, pointed to a recent rally in the corporate bond market as a sign that normalcy was returning to the financial system. He asserted that this presaged the resumption of economic growth in the second half of this year and vigorous activity next year.
“The labor market is going to lag the recovery process to a certain degree,” he said.
But other experts argued that employment was a more crucial source of spending power than in downturns past, given how many alternate sources of cash had been lost.
Consumer spending amounts to 70 percent of overall American economic activity. In recent times, Americans found myriad ways to fuel spending even as incomes for many households stagnated, borrowing against the once-rising value of homes and tapping credit cards.
Now, the paycheck has returned as the primary source of spending. Yet pay is eroding even for those who have jobs.
The average workweek for rank-and-file employees in the private sector — roughly 80 percent of the work force — slipped by a fraction to 33 hours, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data in 1964.
The so-called underemployment rate — which captures not only the jobless but also those working part time because their hours have been cut or they cannot find a full-time job — increased to 16.5 percent.
Some economists contend that while unemployment remains high, millions of Americans will continue to watch their spending.
“It looks really bad,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “There are no green shoots here. People can’t spend when they don’t have the money.”
For another month, the average length of official unemployment increased, this time to 24.5 weeks — the highest level since the government began tracking such data in 1948. The unemployment rate, 9.5 percent, is the highest since 1983.
Layoffs have slowed in recent months, but hiring has yet to pick up, meaning that jobless people face a more frustrating search.
In the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Jeffrey Jones, 40, has found no work since losing his job as a cook at a senior center in October. He worries about paying rent and caring for his four children.
“I know I’m not supposed to be letting it stress me out,” he said. “The way I’m going now, I won’t be able to make it too much longer. I can’t go this long without doing something for my family.”
Jack Healy contributed reporting.
Barack Hoover Obama: The Best and the Brightest Blow It Again
By Kevin Baker
Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. At home or abroad, he invariably appears to be the only adult in the room, the first American president in at least forty years to convey any gravitas. Even the most liberal of voters are finding it hard to believe they managed to elect this man to be their president.
It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression, catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of Guant·namo, a floundering education system.
Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—to seize the radical moment at hand.
Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done.
We have confronted such emergencies only a few times before in the history of the Republic: during the secession crisis of 1860–61, at the start of World War II, at the outset of the Cold War and the nuclear age. Probably the moment most comparable to the present was the start of the Great Depression, and for the scope and the quantity of the problems he is facing, Obama has frequently been compared with Franklin Roosevelt. So far, though, he most resembles the other president who had to confront that crisis, Herbert Hoover.
The comparison is not meant to be flippant. It has nothing to do with the received image of Hoover, the dour, round-collared, gerbil-cheeked technocrat who looked on with indifference while the country went to pieces. To understand how dire our situation is now it is necessary to remember that when he was elected president in 1928, Herbert Hoover was widely considered the most capable public figure in the country. Hoover—like Obama—was almost certainly someone gifted with more intelligence, a better education, and a greater range of life experience than FDR. And Hoover, through the first three years of the Depression, was also the man who comprehended better than anyone else what was happening and what needed to be done. And yet he failed.
The story of the real Herbert Hoover reads like something out of an Indiana Jones script, with touches of Dickens and the memoirs of Albert Schweitzer. Orphaned and penniless by the age of nine, Hoover was raised by an exploitative uncle who considered him more chattel than son. He had no illusions about the America he grew up in, writing years later, “As gentle as are the memories of the times, I am not recommending a return to the good old days. Sadness was greater, and death came sooner.”
Removed from public school at fourteen to work as his uncle’s office boy, Hoover nonetheless learned enough at night school to make the very first class at the newly opened Stanford University, where he studied geology and engineering. He paid his own way by working as a waiter, a typist, and a handyman, and eventually running a laundry service, a baggage service, and a newspaper route. (Unsurprisingly, his favorite book was David Copperfield.) After graduation, he ran mining camps and scouted new strikes around the globe. It was an adventurous life; on one occasion he made a small fortune by following an ancient Chinese map and tiger tracks into a moribund silver mine in Burma. By the time he was forty, Hoover was worth $85 million in today’s dollars, and he retired from business to take up public life. “The ideal of service,” he would later write, was no burden on the striving entrepreneur but a “great spiritual force poured out by our people as never before in the history of the world.”
He had long lived up to his ideals. Caught in the siege of the Western delegations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, only Hoover and his fearless wife, Lou, cared enough to sneak food and water to the Chinese Christians besieged elsewhere in the city. He first came to national attention after the start of World War I, when he led the effort to feed the 7 million people of occupied Belgium and France. He worked for free, donated part of his own fortune to the cause, and risked his life repeatedly crossing the U-boat–infested waters of the North Atlantic. His postwar relief efforts rescued millions more throughout Europe and especially in the Soviet Union; it’s unlikely that any other individual in human history saved so many people from death by starvation and want. Questioned about feeding populations under Bolshevik control, he banged a table and insisted, “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!” In 1920, many people in both major parties wanted to run him for president, but he opted for the Republican cabinet. As secretary of commerce under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he was a dynamic figure, tirelessly promoting new technologies, work-safety rules, and voluntary industry standards; he supervised relief to Mississippi and Louisiana during the terrible 1927 floods and advocated cooperation between labor and management.
“We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we sat back comfortably and confidently to watch the problems being solved,” the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote of Hoover’s inauguration in March 1929, in words that might easily have been used in January 2009. “Almost with the air of giving genius its chance, we waited for the performance to begin.”
Genius got its chance less than eight months after Hoover was sworn in, when the stock market collapsed. At the time, such an event wasn’t seen as having anything much to do with the president. Wall Street crashes happened every five to ten years in the old American economy, and it was understood that these crashes would sometimes start nationwide recessions. They might last a year or two, like the recession that started in 1920, or for much longer, like the devastating depression that began in 1873 and, according to some economists, didn’t really end until 1897. How long would it take to recover from the crash of ‘29? Who could know? Mere politicians were supposed to leave the outcome to the workings of the market. But Hoover—much like Obama—plunged right in, with a response that was designed to rise above old ideological battles and effect a new partnership between the public and private sectors. Less than a month after the Wall Street crash, he began what would be weeks of meetings at the White House with hundreds of “key men” from the business world. There the president briefed them on everything he had done so far and urged them to cut as few jobs as possible for the duration of the slump. He also encouraged public and private construction projects, signed bills recognizing the right of unions to organize, and used the fledgling Federal Reserve both to ease credit and to discourage banks from calling in their stock-market loans.
All of these projects were anathema to old-line conservatives in Hoover’s own party, such as Andrew Mellon, the tax-slashing secretary of the treasury throughout the go-go years of the 1920s boom, who offered the president the absurdist advice to let the market “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” Cutting one of the main ties to the trickle-down wisdom of what was suddenly a previous era, Hoover eventually shipped Mellon off to serve as ambassador to England.
Yet there remained little immediate action that the president could take, hobbled as he was by the limits of a federal government that made up less than 4 percent of the GDP and by the reluctance of those around him to interfere in any way with the sanctity of the markets. At what John Kenneth Galbraith would later skewer as “no-business” meetings, the key men of industry pledged their full support, then went home to slash wages and cut as many jobs as they could. By the end of 1930, the gross national product had dropped by nearly 13 percent, unemployment had shot up to nearly 9 percent, and over 600 banks had closed. The Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives, but the primary response to the Depression offered by their laconic speaker, “Cactus Jack” Garner, was a national sales tax designed to balance the budget. Liberal legislators in both parties were more sympathetic, but they wielded little power.
As the Depression spread around the world, Hoover—like Obama—towered above the squabbling, suspicious leaders of Europe as well. Only Hoover, who had lived all around the world (like Obama) and also been part of the U.S. delegation at Versailles, seemed to understand the true threat the Depression posed to the global economy. Democratic forms of government were under assault everywhere in the West, and especially in the Weimar Republic, still staggering under the indemnity the victorious Allies had imposed on Germany in 1919. Hoover sought to alleviate the growing world credit crunch by pushing through a moratorium on the repayment of Europe’s considerable war debt to the United States—on the condition that the Allies also forgave Germany its indemnity. It was an example of statesmanship at its most enlightened, and if any single U.S. action at the time could have prevented the rise of the Nazis to power, this would have been it.
Back on the domestic front, Hoover tried to organize national, voluntary efforts to hire the unemployed, provide charity, and create a private banking pool. When these efforts collapsed or fell short, he started a dozen Home Loan Discount Banks to help individuals refinance their mortgages and save their homes, and created an unprecedented government entity called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Authorized to spend up to the then-astonishing sum of $2 billion, the RFC was a direct rebuttal to Andrew Mellon’s prescription of creative destruction. Rather than liquidating banks, railroads, and agricultural cooperatives, the RFC would lend them money to stay afloat.
Hoover, as the historian David M. Kennedy writes, had shown “himself capable of the most pragmatic, far-reaching, economic heterodoxy,” a trait that “would in the end carry him and the country into uncharted economic and political territory.” New Dealer Rexford Tugwell would, many years later, claim that “practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” Indeed, “Hoover had wanted—and had said clearly enough that he wanted—nearly all the changes now brought under the New Deal label.”
Tugwell’s appraisal, though considerably exaggerated, nonetheless testifies to the boldness of Hoover’s program. The only problem was that it did not work. The nation’s credit system still would not thaw, banks kept falling like dominoes, unemployment rates and human suffering continued to rise. For all of his willingness to break with precedent and intervene directly in the economy, Hoover remained unable to turn his back fully on what Kennedy describes as the prevailing “legacy of perception and understanding of economic theory.”
As Europe faltered, for instance, foreign gold began to flow out of America’s banks and back home. Hoover reacted by increasing interest rates and raising taxes, in an effort to further deflate the economy, balance the federal budget, and thereby lure the gold back. This was the textbook economic response of the time to fleeing gold reserves; in the midst of the Great Depression, it was a disaster.
Meanwhile, the RFC was derided by populist critics as “bank relief” and “a millionaire’s dole”—criticisms echoed today by all those who see George W. Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and Obama’s own Public-Private Investment Program as outrageous giveaways. And, as Kennedy points out, once Hoover had set in motion the great bank bailout of 1931, he “had given up the ground of high principle” and “implicitly legitimated the claims of other sectors for federal assistance.” Critics raised the same criticisms they would raise about Obama’s bailout plans seventy-eight years later. If the banks get a bailout, why not everyone else? Were bailouts only for the rich?
Exacerbating the entire situation was the RFC itself. Hoover’s leading weapon to combat the Depression performed with TARP-like languor, secrecy, and nepotism. Throughout 1932, as banks continued to topple by the hundreds, the RFC disbursed only three-quarters of its available money. Although Hoover had declared that the agency was “not created for the aid of big industries or big banks,” a record of its operations revealed that most of its money had indeed gone to a very few of the country’s biggest financial institutions. In June of 1932, the RFC’s president, Charles G. Dawes—who had just served as vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge—resigned his post, took a new job as head of the Central Republic Bank in Chicago, and promptly secured for his employer an RFC loan that nearly equaled the bank’s total deposits. Dawes’s successor, Atlee Pomerene, then lent another $12 million to a Cleveland bank of which he remained a director.
These facts were, in the end, wrestled out in the open only by congressional fiat. The recipients of some $642 million of the RFC’s loans—nearly half its total expenditures—were not revealed at all. Hoover, like Obama, had insisted on secrecy to keep the proceedings from being “politicized,” but, inevitably, this fear of politicization in the end only led to more politics. The writer John T. Flynn, who reported much of the RFC scandal in the pages of this magazine, found that most of the money was distributed “by a group of directors drawn from those business groups whose performances during the pre-crash years have rendered them objects of suspicion to the American people” and that the “immense sums they dispensed were given to borrowers, many of whom, to put it mildly, have forfeited, justly or unjustly, the confidence of the people.”
The RFC’s deliberations were understood—with good reason—not as effective management but as insider dealing: common financial practice through the 1920s, but politically and morally insupportable at a time when millions of Americans were losing their jobs, their homes, and their savings, and when some were literally dying of starvation. What’s more, even the loans that were made proved less than effective. The rescued banks, much like the rescued banks today, simply hoarded the new capital and refused to venture out into the marketplace.
Neither the RFC nor any of Hoover’s other programs did anything to seriously address the other major problems then plaguing the American economy: the decades-long farm crisis that was sweeping away Dust Bowl farmers’ actual soil along with their holdings; the near annihilation of the labor movement; a wildly unequal distribution of wealth; the lack of any real safety net for the old, the indigent, and the unemployable; a corrupt, non-transparent financial system that remained largely unregulated—in short, the need for systematic, wholesale reform of a nation that had foundered on the changing circumstances of the modern world.
It would have been very difficult to make most of these changes, because by and large they were advocated only by what were then the most radical individuals on the fringes of the political system. The one thing to be said in favor of such changes was that they were absolutely necessary.
By the summer of 1932, the country was in a state of near rebellion, with the “Bonus Army” of angry veterans camped out in Washington, farmers dumping their produce on the highways in protest, and mobs forcibly stopping evictions in the cities. The liberals in Congress had moved at last beyond Hoover, with even Jack Garner backing a $2.1-billion package of public works and direct relief. Hoover vetoed it, warning against the moral entrapments of “the dole.”
Why was Herbert Hoover so reluctant to make the radical changes that were so clearly needed? It could not have been a question of competence or compassion for this lifelong Quaker, who had rushed sustenance to starving people around the world regardless of their nationalities or beliefs. Ultimately, Hoover could not break with the prevailing beliefs of his day. The essence of the Progressive Era in which he had come of age—the very essence of his own public image—was that government was a science. It was not a coincidence that this era brought us the very term “political science,” along with the advent of “nonpartisan” elections and “city managers” to replace mayors.
Since the 1890s, Hoover and his contemporaries had promoted this brand of progressivism as an alternative not only to the political and corporate corruption of the Gilded Age but also to the furious class and regional warfare that progressivism’s predecessor, populism, seemed to promise. Progressivism aspired to be something of a political science itself, untrammeled by ideological or partisan influence: there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and all unselfish and uncorrupted individuals could be counted on to do the right thing, once they were shown what that was.
There were plenty of progressives, led by Teddy Roosevelt, who understood that bringing real change meant fighting to bust up trusts, regain public ownership of utilities, and secure rights for labor, women, and others. But the great national effort inspired by World War I softened memories of the bitter class conflict that had characterized much of American politics since the Civil War, just as the rollicking prosperity of the 1920s erased memories of the postwar Red Scare and the crushing of labor unions. Throughout the decade, big business sought to co-opt any lingering labor resentments by forming “company unions” under what they called “the American Plan.” Volunteerism and boosterism would take care of the rest. Prosperity would come through an always rising stock market.
Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenets he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required.
Such a transformation would have required a mental suppleness that was simply not in the makeup of this fabulously successful scientist and self-made businessman. And it was this inability to radically alter his thinking that, ultimately, distinguished Hoover from Franklin Roosevelt. FDR was by no means the rigorous thinker that Hoover was, and many observers then and since have accused him of having no fixed principles whatsoever. And yet it was Roosevelt, the Great Improviser, who was able to patch and borrow and fudge his way to solutions not only to the Depression but also to sustained prosperity and democracy. It was FDR, brought up with the entitled, patronizing worldview of a Hudson Valley aristocrat, who was able to overcome attachments to all classes, all theories. It was Roosevelt who understood the imperfections, the rough-and-tumble of politics. The programs of the First and Second New Deals were a hodgepodge of ideologies—which is precisely why they worked. The innovations they brought about, however sloppily, were the core of twentieth-century American liberalism in that they reflected the complex ever-changing realities of the modern world.
Originally, Roosevelt, too, endorsed much of the progressive vision—or at least its pale 1920s imitation—as evidenced by his National Recovery Administration, a flabby utopian plan that would have had business, labor, and government collaborate to set prices, wages, and industry standards down to the most minute details. The NRA would have carried 1920s-style business progressivism right to the doorstep of the corporate state, had it been even vaguely workable. But right from the beginning, Roosevelt also endorsed reforms, from regulating Wall Street to saving the farmers to backing labor unions in their organizing wars, that required _conflict—_the only way in which a political and economic system can be fundamentally remade. When the NRA quickly proved to be a bust, FDR discarded it, and replaced his failure with the Second New Deal, in which business, labor, and government were situated as countervailing forces against one another—a fundamental power shift that enabled advances in both prosperity and democracy unmatched in human history.
Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past—without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.
President Obama, to be fair, seems to be even more alone than Hoover was in facing the emergency at hand. The most appalling aspect of the present crisis has been the utter fecklessness of the American elite in failing to confront it. From both the private and public sectors, across the entire political spectrum, the lack of both will and new ideas has been stunning. When it came to the opposition, Franklin Roosevelt reaped the creative support of any number of progressive Republicans throughout his twelve years in office, ranging from New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to Nebraska Senator George Norris to key cabinet members such as Henry A. Wallace, Harold Ickes, Henry Stimson, and Frank Knox. Obama, by contrast, has had to contend with a knee-jerk rejectionist Republican Party.
More frustrating has been the torpor among Obama’s fellow Democrats. One might have assumed that the adrenaline rush of regaining power after decades of conservative hegemony, not to mention relief at surviving the depredations of the Bush years, or losing the vestigial tail of the white Southern branch of the party, would have liberated congressional Democrats to loose a burst of pent-up, imaginative liberal initiatives.
Instead, we have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table. Every week, there is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota, another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for “trying to do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—yet another small gray man from a great big space where the tumbleweeds blow—seems unwilling to make even a symbolic effort at party discipline. Within days of President Obama’s announcing his legislative agenda, the perpetually callow Indiana Senator Evan Bayh came forward to announce the formation of a breakaway caucus of fifteen “moderate” Democrats from the Midwest who sought to help the country make “the changes we need” but “make sure that they’re done in a practical way that will actually work”—a statement that was almost Zen-like in its perfect vacuousness. Even most of the Senate’s more enlightened notables, such as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin or Claire McCaskill of Missouri or Sherrod Brown of Ohio, have had little to contribute beyond some hand-wringing whenever the idea of a carbon tax or any other restrictions on burning coal are proposed.
President Obama, with a laudable respect for the separation of powers, has left the details and even the main tenets of his agenda to be worked out by these same congressional Democrats. This approach looks like an exercise in democracy drawn from his days as a community organizer, the sort of strategy that helps a neighborhood to decide whether it wants, say, a health clinic or a youth center. What he doesn’t care to acknowledge is that, in the case of the U.S. Congress, he’s dealing with a neighborhood where maybe half want a health clinic and the rest are holding out for grenade launchers and crystal meth.
Some have suggested that this is a subtle strategy to ensure that the White House retains the whip hand, that Obama is reserving for himself the role of “decider” over competing plans. But what is the decision then? Half a health clinic and one grenade launcher? A plan for universal health care that is not universal and doesn’t cut costs will not work. A plan for combating climate change that perpetuates the shibboleth of “clean coal” will do nothing. Far from controlling the process, Obama’s procedure is more likely to commit him to one of Congress’s nebulous non-plans.
Yet Obama’s lack of direction, his lack of accomplishments in his Hundred Days and counting, cannot be attributed solely to his illusions about the august body he just vacated. Obama, like Hoover in his time, is almost alone among politicians in grasping the magnitude of the crisis. In his masterful February speech before the joint houses of Congress, Obama explained to the country why we cannot afford to continue with a tottering health-care system that has left 46 million Americans uninsured and that impedes our exports by adding, for instance, $1,500 to the cost of every GM car; why it is that climate change has to be addressed now, and how by addressing it we can regain our industrial base and actually begin to make things again; why it is that our financial system could not simply be bailed out and patched up but must be fundamentally reformed and re-regulated. Above all, he explained the necessary interaction of all these reforms, of how they were not just some liberal wish list but the actions that the radical moment demanded.
Speeches almost as powerful have followed, always linking these ideas together. But, like Hoover, Obama has been unable to make his actions live up to his words. Health care is being gummed to death on Capitol Hill. Obama has done nothing to pass “card check” provisions that would facilitate union organization and quietly announced that he would not seek stronger labor and environmental protections in NAFTA. He has capitulated on cap-and-trade in the budget outline and never even bothered to push for an actual carbon tax. Only minuscule portions of the stimulus bill or his budget proposals were dedicated to mass transit, and his indifference to the issue—what must be a major component of any serious effort to go green—was reflected in his appointment of a mediocre Republican time-server, Ray LaHood, as his transportation secretary.
Still worse is Obama’s decision to leave the reordering of the financial world solely to Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, both of whom played such a major role in deregulating Wall Street and bringing on the disaster in the first place. It’s as if, after winning election in 1932, FDR had brought Andrew Mellon back to the Treasury. Just as Herbert Hoover could not, in the end, break away from the best economic advice of the 1920s, Barack Obama is sticking with the “key men” of the 1990s. The predictable result is that, even as he claims to recognize the interlocking nature of the problems facing us and vows to solve them as a whole, the president is in fact abandoning most of his program, at least for the time being.
No doubt, President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would claim that by practicing “the art of the possible,” they are ensuring that “the perfect does not become the enemy of the good.” But by not even proposing the relevant legislation, Obama has ceded a key part of the process—so much so that his retreat seems not so much tactical as a reversion to his core political beliefs.
A major theme of Obama’s 2006 book The Audacity of Hope is impatience with “the smallness of our politics” and its “partisanship and acrimony.” He expresses frustration at how “the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse,” and voices a professional appreciation for Ronald Reagan’s ability to exploit such divisions. The politician he admires the most—ironically enough, considering the campaign that was to come—is Bill Clinton. For all his faults, Clinton, in Obama’s eyes, “instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the American people” and came up with his “Third Way,” which “tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of the majority of Americans.”
This is an analysis consistent with Obama’s personal story. Like Herbert Hoover, Obama grew up as an outsider and overcame formidable odds—hence his constant promotion of personal responsibility and education. He came of age in a time when hardworking young men and women like him went to Wall Street or to Silicon Valley, and—once properly “incentivized” by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—seemed to save the national economy, creating what appeared to be great general prosperity while doing well themselves. There’s no need to do battle with these strivers and achievers, individuals as accomplished in their fields as Obama is in his. All that’s required is to get them back on their feet, get the money running again, and maybe give them a few new rules to live by, a new set of incentives to get them back on track.
Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the “business progressivism” of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile, counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama internalized what might be called Clinton’s “business liberalism” as an alternative to useless battles from another time—battles that liberals, in any case, tended to lose.
Clinton’s business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover’s 1920s progressivism. We are back in Evan Bayh territory here, espousing a “pragmatism” that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running through all of Obama’s major proposals right now is that they are labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools—all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening for Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own defeat.
Obama will have to directly attack the fortified bastions of the newest “new class”—the makers of the paper economy in which he came of age—if he is to accomplish anything. These interests did not spend fifty years shipping the greatest industrial economy in the history of the world overseas only to be challenged by a newly empowered, green-economy working class. They did not spend much of the past two decades gobbling up previously public sectors such as health care, education, and transportation only to have to compete with a reinvigorated public sector. They mean, even now, to use the bailout to make the government their helpless junior partner, and if they can they will devour every federal dollar available to recoup their own losses, and thereby preclude the use of any monies for the rest of Barack Obama’s splendid vision.
Franklin Roosevelt also took office imagining that he could bring all classes of Americans together in some big, mushy, cooperative scheme. Quickly disabused of this notion, he threw himself into the bumptious give-and-take of practical politics; lying, deceiving, manipulating, arraying one group after another on his side—a transit encapsulated by how, at the end of his first term, his outraged opponents were calling him a “traitor to his class” and he was gleefully inveighing against “economic royalists” and announcing, “They are unanimous in their hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
Obama should not deceive himself into thinking that such interest-group politics can be banished any more than can the cycles of Wall Street. It is not too late for him to change direction and seize the radical moment at hand. But for the moment, just like another very good man, Barack Obama is moving prudently, carefully, reasonably toward disaster.
Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. At home or abroad, he invariably appears to be the only adult in the room, the first American president in at least forty years to convey any gravitas. Even the most liberal of voters are finding it hard to believe they managed to elect this man to be their president.
It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression, catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of Guant·namo, a floundering education system.
Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—to seize the radical moment at hand.
Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is not what can be done but what must be done.
We have confronted such emergencies only a few times before in the history of the Republic: during the secession crisis of 1860–61, at the start of World War II, at the outset of the Cold War and the nuclear age. Probably the moment most comparable to the present was the start of the Great Depression, and for the scope and the quantity of the problems he is facing, Obama has frequently been compared with Franklin Roosevelt. So far, though, he most resembles the other president who had to confront that crisis, Herbert Hoover.
The comparison is not meant to be flippant. It has nothing to do with the received image of Hoover, the dour, round-collared, gerbil-cheeked technocrat who looked on with indifference while the country went to pieces. To understand how dire our situation is now it is necessary to remember that when he was elected president in 1928, Herbert Hoover was widely considered the most capable public figure in the country. Hoover—like Obama—was almost certainly someone gifted with more intelligence, a better education, and a greater range of life experience than FDR. And Hoover, through the first three years of the Depression, was also the man who comprehended better than anyone else what was happening and what needed to be done. And yet he failed.
The story of the real Herbert Hoover reads like something out of an Indiana Jones script, with touches of Dickens and the memoirs of Albert Schweitzer. Orphaned and penniless by the age of nine, Hoover was raised by an exploitative uncle who considered him more chattel than son. He had no illusions about the America he grew up in, writing years later, “As gentle as are the memories of the times, I am not recommending a return to the good old days. Sadness was greater, and death came sooner.”
Removed from public school at fourteen to work as his uncle’s office boy, Hoover nonetheless learned enough at night school to make the very first class at the newly opened Stanford University, where he studied geology and engineering. He paid his own way by working as a waiter, a typist, and a handyman, and eventually running a laundry service, a baggage service, and a newspaper route. (Unsurprisingly, his favorite book was David Copperfield.) After graduation, he ran mining camps and scouted new strikes around the globe. It was an adventurous life; on one occasion he made a small fortune by following an ancient Chinese map and tiger tracks into a moribund silver mine in Burma. By the time he was forty, Hoover was worth $85 million in today’s dollars, and he retired from business to take up public life. “The ideal of service,” he would later write, was no burden on the striving entrepreneur but a “great spiritual force poured out by our people as never before in the history of the world.”
He had long lived up to his ideals. Caught in the siege of the Western delegations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, only Hoover and his fearless wife, Lou, cared enough to sneak food and water to the Chinese Christians besieged elsewhere in the city. He first came to national attention after the start of World War I, when he led the effort to feed the 7 million people of occupied Belgium and France. He worked for free, donated part of his own fortune to the cause, and risked his life repeatedly crossing the U-boat–infested waters of the North Atlantic. His postwar relief efforts rescued millions more throughout Europe and especially in the Soviet Union; it’s unlikely that any other individual in human history saved so many people from death by starvation and want. Questioned about feeding populations under Bolshevik control, he banged a table and insisted, “Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!” In 1920, many people in both major parties wanted to run him for president, but he opted for the Republican cabinet. As secretary of commerce under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he was a dynamic figure, tirelessly promoting new technologies, work-safety rules, and voluntary industry standards; he supervised relief to Mississippi and Louisiana during the terrible 1927 floods and advocated cooperation between labor and management.
“We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us; now we sat back comfortably and confidently to watch the problems being solved,” the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote of Hoover’s inauguration in March 1929, in words that might easily have been used in January 2009. “Almost with the air of giving genius its chance, we waited for the performance to begin.”
Genius got its chance less than eight months after Hoover was sworn in, when the stock market collapsed. At the time, such an event wasn’t seen as having anything much to do with the president. Wall Street crashes happened every five to ten years in the old American economy, and it was understood that these crashes would sometimes start nationwide recessions. They might last a year or two, like the recession that started in 1920, or for much longer, like the devastating depression that began in 1873 and, according to some economists, didn’t really end until 1897. How long would it take to recover from the crash of ‘29? Who could know? Mere politicians were supposed to leave the outcome to the workings of the market. But Hoover—much like Obama—plunged right in, with a response that was designed to rise above old ideological battles and effect a new partnership between the public and private sectors. Less than a month after the Wall Street crash, he began what would be weeks of meetings at the White House with hundreds of “key men” from the business world. There the president briefed them on everything he had done so far and urged them to cut as few jobs as possible for the duration of the slump. He also encouraged public and private construction projects, signed bills recognizing the right of unions to organize, and used the fledgling Federal Reserve both to ease credit and to discourage banks from calling in their stock-market loans.
All of these projects were anathema to old-line conservatives in Hoover’s own party, such as Andrew Mellon, the tax-slashing secretary of the treasury throughout the go-go years of the 1920s boom, who offered the president the absurdist advice to let the market “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” Cutting one of the main ties to the trickle-down wisdom of what was suddenly a previous era, Hoover eventually shipped Mellon off to serve as ambassador to England.
Yet there remained little immediate action that the president could take, hobbled as he was by the limits of a federal government that made up less than 4 percent of the GDP and by the reluctance of those around him to interfere in any way with the sanctity of the markets. At what John Kenneth Galbraith would later skewer as “no-business” meetings, the key men of industry pledged their full support, then went home to slash wages and cut as many jobs as they could. By the end of 1930, the gross national product had dropped by nearly 13 percent, unemployment had shot up to nearly 9 percent, and over 600 banks had closed. The Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives, but the primary response to the Depression offered by their laconic speaker, “Cactus Jack” Garner, was a national sales tax designed to balance the budget. Liberal legislators in both parties were more sympathetic, but they wielded little power.
As the Depression spread around the world, Hoover—like Obama—towered above the squabbling, suspicious leaders of Europe as well. Only Hoover, who had lived all around the world (like Obama) and also been part of the U.S. delegation at Versailles, seemed to understand the true threat the Depression posed to the global economy. Democratic forms of government were under assault everywhere in the West, and especially in the Weimar Republic, still staggering under the indemnity the victorious Allies had imposed on Germany in 1919. Hoover sought to alleviate the growing world credit crunch by pushing through a moratorium on the repayment of Europe’s considerable war debt to the United States—on the condition that the Allies also forgave Germany its indemnity. It was an example of statesmanship at its most enlightened, and if any single U.S. action at the time could have prevented the rise of the Nazis to power, this would have been it.
Back on the domestic front, Hoover tried to organize national, voluntary efforts to hire the unemployed, provide charity, and create a private banking pool. When these efforts collapsed or fell short, he started a dozen Home Loan Discount Banks to help individuals refinance their mortgages and save their homes, and created an unprecedented government entity called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Authorized to spend up to the then-astonishing sum of $2 billion, the RFC was a direct rebuttal to Andrew Mellon’s prescription of creative destruction. Rather than liquidating banks, railroads, and agricultural cooperatives, the RFC would lend them money to stay afloat.
Hoover, as the historian David M. Kennedy writes, had shown “himself capable of the most pragmatic, far-reaching, economic heterodoxy,” a trait that “would in the end carry him and the country into uncharted economic and political territory.” New Dealer Rexford Tugwell would, many years later, claim that “practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” Indeed, “Hoover had wanted—and had said clearly enough that he wanted—nearly all the changes now brought under the New Deal label.”
Tugwell’s appraisal, though considerably exaggerated, nonetheless testifies to the boldness of Hoover’s program. The only problem was that it did not work. The nation’s credit system still would not thaw, banks kept falling like dominoes, unemployment rates and human suffering continued to rise. For all of his willingness to break with precedent and intervene directly in the economy, Hoover remained unable to turn his back fully on what Kennedy describes as the prevailing “legacy of perception and understanding of economic theory.”
As Europe faltered, for instance, foreign gold began to flow out of America’s banks and back home. Hoover reacted by increasing interest rates and raising taxes, in an effort to further deflate the economy, balance the federal budget, and thereby lure the gold back. This was the textbook economic response of the time to fleeing gold reserves; in the midst of the Great Depression, it was a disaster.
Meanwhile, the RFC was derided by populist critics as “bank relief” and “a millionaire’s dole”—criticisms echoed today by all those who see George W. Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and Obama’s own Public-Private Investment Program as outrageous giveaways. And, as Kennedy points out, once Hoover had set in motion the great bank bailout of 1931, he “had given up the ground of high principle” and “implicitly legitimated the claims of other sectors for federal assistance.” Critics raised the same criticisms they would raise about Obama’s bailout plans seventy-eight years later. If the banks get a bailout, why not everyone else? Were bailouts only for the rich?
Exacerbating the entire situation was the RFC itself. Hoover’s leading weapon to combat the Depression performed with TARP-like languor, secrecy, and nepotism. Throughout 1932, as banks continued to topple by the hundreds, the RFC disbursed only three-quarters of its available money. Although Hoover had declared that the agency was “not created for the aid of big industries or big banks,” a record of its operations revealed that most of its money had indeed gone to a very few of the country’s biggest financial institutions. In June of 1932, the RFC’s president, Charles G. Dawes—who had just served as vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge—resigned his post, took a new job as head of the Central Republic Bank in Chicago, and promptly secured for his employer an RFC loan that nearly equaled the bank’s total deposits. Dawes’s successor, Atlee Pomerene, then lent another $12 million to a Cleveland bank of which he remained a director.
These facts were, in the end, wrestled out in the open only by congressional fiat. The recipients of some $642 million of the RFC’s loans—nearly half its total expenditures—were not revealed at all. Hoover, like Obama, had insisted on secrecy to keep the proceedings from being “politicized,” but, inevitably, this fear of politicization in the end only led to more politics. The writer John T. Flynn, who reported much of the RFC scandal in the pages of this magazine, found that most of the money was distributed “by a group of directors drawn from those business groups whose performances during the pre-crash years have rendered them objects of suspicion to the American people” and that the “immense sums they dispensed were given to borrowers, many of whom, to put it mildly, have forfeited, justly or unjustly, the confidence of the people.”
The RFC’s deliberations were understood—with good reason—not as effective management but as insider dealing: common financial practice through the 1920s, but politically and morally insupportable at a time when millions of Americans were losing their jobs, their homes, and their savings, and when some were literally dying of starvation. What’s more, even the loans that were made proved less than effective. The rescued banks, much like the rescued banks today, simply hoarded the new capital and refused to venture out into the marketplace.
Neither the RFC nor any of Hoover’s other programs did anything to seriously address the other major problems then plaguing the American economy: the decades-long farm crisis that was sweeping away Dust Bowl farmers’ actual soil along with their holdings; the near annihilation of the labor movement; a wildly unequal distribution of wealth; the lack of any real safety net for the old, the indigent, and the unemployable; a corrupt, non-transparent financial system that remained largely unregulated—in short, the need for systematic, wholesale reform of a nation that had foundered on the changing circumstances of the modern world.
It would have been very difficult to make most of these changes, because by and large they were advocated only by what were then the most radical individuals on the fringes of the political system. The one thing to be said in favor of such changes was that they were absolutely necessary.
By the summer of 1932, the country was in a state of near rebellion, with the “Bonus Army” of angry veterans camped out in Washington, farmers dumping their produce on the highways in protest, and mobs forcibly stopping evictions in the cities. The liberals in Congress had moved at last beyond Hoover, with even Jack Garner backing a $2.1-billion package of public works and direct relief. Hoover vetoed it, warning against the moral entrapments of “the dole.”
Why was Herbert Hoover so reluctant to make the radical changes that were so clearly needed? It could not have been a question of competence or compassion for this lifelong Quaker, who had rushed sustenance to starving people around the world regardless of their nationalities or beliefs. Ultimately, Hoover could not break with the prevailing beliefs of his day. The essence of the Progressive Era in which he had come of age—the very essence of his own public image—was that government was a science. It was not a coincidence that this era brought us the very term “political science,” along with the advent of “nonpartisan” elections and “city managers” to replace mayors.
Since the 1890s, Hoover and his contemporaries had promoted this brand of progressivism as an alternative not only to the political and corporate corruption of the Gilded Age but also to the furious class and regional warfare that progressivism’s predecessor, populism, seemed to promise. Progressivism aspired to be something of a political science itself, untrammeled by ideological or partisan influence: there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and all unselfish and uncorrupted individuals could be counted on to do the right thing, once they were shown what that was.
There were plenty of progressives, led by Teddy Roosevelt, who understood that bringing real change meant fighting to bust up trusts, regain public ownership of utilities, and secure rights for labor, women, and others. But the great national effort inspired by World War I softened memories of the bitter class conflict that had characterized much of American politics since the Civil War, just as the rollicking prosperity of the 1920s erased memories of the postwar Red Scare and the crushing of labor unions. Throughout the decade, big business sought to co-opt any lingering labor resentments by forming “company unions” under what they called “the American Plan.” Volunteerism and boosterism would take care of the rest. Prosperity would come through an always rising stock market.
Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenets he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required.
Such a transformation would have required a mental suppleness that was simply not in the makeup of this fabulously successful scientist and self-made businessman. And it was this inability to radically alter his thinking that, ultimately, distinguished Hoover from Franklin Roosevelt. FDR was by no means the rigorous thinker that Hoover was, and many observers then and since have accused him of having no fixed principles whatsoever. And yet it was Roosevelt, the Great Improviser, who was able to patch and borrow and fudge his way to solutions not only to the Depression but also to sustained prosperity and democracy. It was FDR, brought up with the entitled, patronizing worldview of a Hudson Valley aristocrat, who was able to overcome attachments to all classes, all theories. It was Roosevelt who understood the imperfections, the rough-and-tumble of politics. The programs of the First and Second New Deals were a hodgepodge of ideologies—which is precisely why they worked. The innovations they brought about, however sloppily, were the core of twentieth-century American liberalism in that they reflected the complex ever-changing realities of the modern world.
Originally, Roosevelt, too, endorsed much of the progressive vision—or at least its pale 1920s imitation—as evidenced by his National Recovery Administration, a flabby utopian plan that would have had business, labor, and government collaborate to set prices, wages, and industry standards down to the most minute details. The NRA would have carried 1920s-style business progressivism right to the doorstep of the corporate state, had it been even vaguely workable. But right from the beginning, Roosevelt also endorsed reforms, from regulating Wall Street to saving the farmers to backing labor unions in their organizing wars, that required _conflict—_the only way in which a political and economic system can be fundamentally remade. When the NRA quickly proved to be a bust, FDR discarded it, and replaced his failure with the Second New Deal, in which business, labor, and government were situated as countervailing forces against one another—a fundamental power shift that enabled advances in both prosperity and democracy unmatched in human history.
Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past—without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.
President Obama, to be fair, seems to be even more alone than Hoover was in facing the emergency at hand. The most appalling aspect of the present crisis has been the utter fecklessness of the American elite in failing to confront it. From both the private and public sectors, across the entire political spectrum, the lack of both will and new ideas has been stunning. When it came to the opposition, Franklin Roosevelt reaped the creative support of any number of progressive Republicans throughout his twelve years in office, ranging from New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to Nebraska Senator George Norris to key cabinet members such as Henry A. Wallace, Harold Ickes, Henry Stimson, and Frank Knox. Obama, by contrast, has had to contend with a knee-jerk rejectionist Republican Party.
More frustrating has been the torpor among Obama’s fellow Democrats. One might have assumed that the adrenaline rush of regaining power after decades of conservative hegemony, not to mention relief at surviving the depredations of the Bush years, or losing the vestigial tail of the white Southern branch of the party, would have liberated congressional Democrats to loose a burst of pent-up, imaginative liberal initiatives.
Instead, we have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table. Every week, there is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota, another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for “trying to do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—yet another small gray man from a great big space where the tumbleweeds blow—seems unwilling to make even a symbolic effort at party discipline. Within days of President Obama’s announcing his legislative agenda, the perpetually callow Indiana Senator Evan Bayh came forward to announce the formation of a breakaway caucus of fifteen “moderate” Democrats from the Midwest who sought to help the country make “the changes we need” but “make sure that they’re done in a practical way that will actually work”—a statement that was almost Zen-like in its perfect vacuousness. Even most of the Senate’s more enlightened notables, such as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin or Claire McCaskill of Missouri or Sherrod Brown of Ohio, have had little to contribute beyond some hand-wringing whenever the idea of a carbon tax or any other restrictions on burning coal are proposed.
President Obama, with a laudable respect for the separation of powers, has left the details and even the main tenets of his agenda to be worked out by these same congressional Democrats. This approach looks like an exercise in democracy drawn from his days as a community organizer, the sort of strategy that helps a neighborhood to decide whether it wants, say, a health clinic or a youth center. What he doesn’t care to acknowledge is that, in the case of the U.S. Congress, he’s dealing with a neighborhood where maybe half want a health clinic and the rest are holding out for grenade launchers and crystal meth.
Some have suggested that this is a subtle strategy to ensure that the White House retains the whip hand, that Obama is reserving for himself the role of “decider” over competing plans. But what is the decision then? Half a health clinic and one grenade launcher? A plan for universal health care that is not universal and doesn’t cut costs will not work. A plan for combating climate change that perpetuates the shibboleth of “clean coal” will do nothing. Far from controlling the process, Obama’s procedure is more likely to commit him to one of Congress’s nebulous non-plans.
Yet Obama’s lack of direction, his lack of accomplishments in his Hundred Days and counting, cannot be attributed solely to his illusions about the august body he just vacated. Obama, like Hoover in his time, is almost alone among politicians in grasping the magnitude of the crisis. In his masterful February speech before the joint houses of Congress, Obama explained to the country why we cannot afford to continue with a tottering health-care system that has left 46 million Americans uninsured and that impedes our exports by adding, for instance, $1,500 to the cost of every GM car; why it is that climate change has to be addressed now, and how by addressing it we can regain our industrial base and actually begin to make things again; why it is that our financial system could not simply be bailed out and patched up but must be fundamentally reformed and re-regulated. Above all, he explained the necessary interaction of all these reforms, of how they were not just some liberal wish list but the actions that the radical moment demanded.
Speeches almost as powerful have followed, always linking these ideas together. But, like Hoover, Obama has been unable to make his actions live up to his words. Health care is being gummed to death on Capitol Hill. Obama has done nothing to pass “card check” provisions that would facilitate union organization and quietly announced that he would not seek stronger labor and environmental protections in NAFTA. He has capitulated on cap-and-trade in the budget outline and never even bothered to push for an actual carbon tax. Only minuscule portions of the stimulus bill or his budget proposals were dedicated to mass transit, and his indifference to the issue—what must be a major component of any serious effort to go green—was reflected in his appointment of a mediocre Republican time-server, Ray LaHood, as his transportation secretary.
Still worse is Obama’s decision to leave the reordering of the financial world solely to Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, both of whom played such a major role in deregulating Wall Street and bringing on the disaster in the first place. It’s as if, after winning election in 1932, FDR had brought Andrew Mellon back to the Treasury. Just as Herbert Hoover could not, in the end, break away from the best economic advice of the 1920s, Barack Obama is sticking with the “key men” of the 1990s. The predictable result is that, even as he claims to recognize the interlocking nature of the problems facing us and vows to solve them as a whole, the president is in fact abandoning most of his program, at least for the time being.
No doubt, President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would claim that by practicing “the art of the possible,” they are ensuring that “the perfect does not become the enemy of the good.” But by not even proposing the relevant legislation, Obama has ceded a key part of the process—so much so that his retreat seems not so much tactical as a reversion to his core political beliefs.
A major theme of Obama’s 2006 book The Audacity of Hope is impatience with “the smallness of our politics” and its “partisanship and acrimony.” He expresses frustration at how “the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse,” and voices a professional appreciation for Ronald Reagan’s ability to exploit such divisions. The politician he admires the most—ironically enough, considering the campaign that was to come—is Bill Clinton. For all his faults, Clinton, in Obama’s eyes, “instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the American people” and came up with his “Third Way,” which “tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of the majority of Americans.”
This is an analysis consistent with Obama’s personal story. Like Herbert Hoover, Obama grew up as an outsider and overcame formidable odds—hence his constant promotion of personal responsibility and education. He came of age in a time when hardworking young men and women like him went to Wall Street or to Silicon Valley, and—once properly “incentivized” by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—seemed to save the national economy, creating what appeared to be great general prosperity while doing well themselves. There’s no need to do battle with these strivers and achievers, individuals as accomplished in their fields as Obama is in his. All that’s required is to get them back on their feet, get the money running again, and maybe give them a few new rules to live by, a new set of incentives to get them back on track.
Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the “business progressivism” of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile, counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama internalized what might be called Clinton’s “business liberalism” as an alternative to useless battles from another time—battles that liberals, in any case, tended to lose.
Clinton’s business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover’s 1920s progressivism. We are back in Evan Bayh territory here, espousing a “pragmatism” that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running through all of Obama’s major proposals right now is that they are labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools—all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening for Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own defeat.
Obama will have to directly attack the fortified bastions of the newest “new class”—the makers of the paper economy in which he came of age—if he is to accomplish anything. These interests did not spend fifty years shipping the greatest industrial economy in the history of the world overseas only to be challenged by a newly empowered, green-economy working class. They did not spend much of the past two decades gobbling up previously public sectors such as health care, education, and transportation only to have to compete with a reinvigorated public sector. They mean, even now, to use the bailout to make the government their helpless junior partner, and if they can they will devour every federal dollar available to recoup their own losses, and thereby preclude the use of any monies for the rest of Barack Obama’s splendid vision.
Franklin Roosevelt also took office imagining that he could bring all classes of Americans together in some big, mushy, cooperative scheme. Quickly disabused of this notion, he threw himself into the bumptious give-and-take of practical politics; lying, deceiving, manipulating, arraying one group after another on his side—a transit encapsulated by how, at the end of his first term, his outraged opponents were calling him a “traitor to his class” and he was gleefully inveighing against “economic royalists” and announcing, “They are unanimous in their hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
Obama should not deceive himself into thinking that such interest-group politics can be banished any more than can the cycles of Wall Street. It is not too late for him to change direction and seize the radical moment at hand. But for the moment, just like another very good man, Barack Obama is moving prudently, carefully, reasonably toward disaster.
An Empire of Vice
By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba...andThen Lost It to the Revolution
by T.J. English
Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos
by Louis A. Perez Jr
Pichon: Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba, a Memoir
by Carlos Moore
Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause
by Tom Gjelten
That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution
by Lars Schoultz
The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution
by Daniel P. Erikson
Three days before Christmas in 1946, Havana's Hotel Nacional was closed for a private meeting. Armed guards blocked entry to its lovely grounds atop a seaside bluff in the plush El Vedado district. Inside the stately cream-colored Art Deco hotel, a group of distinguished foreign visitors tucked into a feast of local delicacies. There were crab and queen conch enchiladas from the southern archipelago; swordfish and oysters from the nearby village of Cojímar; roast breast of flamingo and tortoise stew; grilled manatee, washed down with añejo rum. It is unknown whether the attendees--whose number included about twenty of North America's most notorious gangsters--ended their meal with a cake like the one served at their feast's fictional rendering in The Godfather Part II. But as in the film, the purpose of the gathering was clear: to divvy up shares in the empire of vice they were busy establishing in Havana.
During the next decade, the mafia built a seaside gambling resort, which soon rivaled in profits and glamour its sister project in dusty Las Vegas. Under the canny direction of Meyer Lansky, the Jewish don who'd risen from the streets of New York's Lower East Side, members of the Havana Mob became fabulously wealthy. So too did Cuba's US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, whose stake in the mob's affairs exceeded the sacks of cash delivered weekly to the presidential palace. With Lansky and fellow mobsters like Santo Trafficante employed as "tourism experts" in his government, Batista eliminated taxes on the tourism industry, guaranteed public financing for hotel construction and--as T.J. English shows in Havana Nocturne, an exacting and lively account of the era--even granted responsibility for Cuba's infrastructure development to a new mob-controlled bank, BANDES. In December 1957 the opening of the Riviera, a $14 million mafia show palace just down the seawall from the Nacional, was celebrated by a special episode of The Steve Allen Show on US television and a gala in Havana featuring Ginger Rogers. Three months later, the twenty-five-story Havana Hilton--mortgage holder: BANDES--became Cuba's biggest hotel yet.
The party ended on New Year's 1959, when Batista fled the island as Fidel Castro's barbudos advanced on its capital. Castro and his bearded rebels established their headquarters in the Havana Hilton and loosed a truckload of pigs on the sleek lobby of the Riviera. Castro announced the "socialist nature" of his revolution. Nikita Khrushchev sent Soviet missiles. President John F. Kennedy--who, during a visit to Havana the previous year as a senator, had spent an afternoon with three mob-supplied prostitutes under the gaze, from behind a two-way hotel-room mirror, of Santo Trafficante--instituted the embargo that defines US-Cuba relations to this day.
"I couldn't get that little island off of my mind," Lansky remarked after his first visit to Cuba in the 1920s. The gangster was no less covetous of Cuba, and proved no less fixated on controlling it, than a series of US presidents reaching back to the founders. "I have ever looked on Cuba," wrote Thomas Jefferson to President James Monroe when the United States gained control of the Florida peninsula in 1821, "as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States." Monroe's secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, was more blunt. "The annexation of Cuba to our federal republic," he wrote, "will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself." After the United States took possession of Texas and California by war in 1848, many in Washington advocated annexing Cuba by force as well. The impulse was quashed for a time. Nevertheless, with Spain's empire sunk in a long decline, the United States' eventual possession of Cuba was viewed as inevitable for most of the nineteenth century. In a political cartoon from 1897, one of a trove of such images Louis A. Pérez Jr. uses to illustrate his brilliant book Cuba in the American Imagination, Uncle Sam stands beneath a fruit tree with a basket of plums, each bearing the name of a foreign territory already attained--Louisiana, Florida, Texas. From an upper branch hangs a "Cuba" plum, upon which Sam gazes keenly, his look distilling the common view: if America refrained from picking Cuba with a forceful hand, the ripe prize would eventually fall to its basket simply by dint of geography and time.
When the warship USS Maine mysteriously exploded while docked at Spanish Havana in February 1898, the United States had a pretext for shaking the tree of its remaining fruit. A few months later, Cuban rebels and invading US forces expelled Spain from the island, and Cuba (along with Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines) was annexed to the United States. "We went to war for civilization and humanity," President William McKinley eulogized, "to relieve our oppressed neighbors in Cuba." Humanity's gains were hazy, but what the United States certainly gained from the war was an empire. Puerto Rico and the Philippines became de facto American colonies; and with the passage of the Platt Amendment in 1901, Washington arrogated to itself the right to intervene in Cuba's affairs whenever it wished--providing also for the seizure of Cuban territory at Guantánamo Bay to establish a US naval base purposed "to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba" (and conveniently positioned to protect what would soon be a key sea lane to the Panama Canal).
Gaining control of Cuba fulfilled a long-sought strategic aim. But equally important for the United States was how the invasion of Cuba came to shape its foreign policy and self-image at large. The Spanish-American War--the Union's first large-scale military campaign since Reconstruction--bolstered American unity and inaugurated America's self-conception as a "universal nation" endowed with the moral mission of projecting its power abroad. Before 1898, as Pérez stresses, quoting the historian Norman Graebner, "the foreign policies of the United States were rendered solvent by ample power to cover limited, largely hemispheric, goals." Afterward, those policies became global, their stated aims--universal democracy and freedom for all humanity--abstract in nature and unobtainable in practice. As Pérez writes, the template for US foreign wars, up to the "war on terror," with its crusading aim to "rid the world of evil," was cast in America's war for Cuba.
The argument that the Spanish-American War was a watershed in the United States' fashioning of its national identity isn't new. The value of Pérez's study--the latest in a series of perceptive books on US-Cuba relations by this prolific historian--is to illustrate how an avid US self-interest was transformed into selfless moral enactment. While Cuba in the American Imagination is hampered by confusing chronology, Pérez shows clearly how in the late nineteenth century politicians in the United States and their allies in the press employed language--and a series of figurative metaphors specifically--to nurture in Americans' minds a conception of Cuba as object and stage for fulfilling the United States' imperial destiny. Early on, there was the image of Cuba as ripening fruit that would "naturally" and inevitably one day be Uncle Sam's. Later came references to Cuba as "our Armenia," implying that the United States, by defending Cuba's rebels against Madrid's repression, could prove its humanitarian mettle where Europe's nations had failed to prevent the recent Armenian genocide at their door. And finally, as invasion approached, there were invocations of Cuba as a virtuous lady whose protection against Spain's depredations was a test of American manhood.
This last figure was yanked out of the political funny pages and foisted upon Evangelina Cossío Cisneros, the 18-year-old daughter of a Cuban rebel leader purportedly arrested for sedition in August 1897 who was also, according to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, "the most beautiful girl in the island." Evangelina's picture became a tabloid staple, her ordeal at the hands of her captors the topic of regular lurid updates. The melodrama ended only when Hearst's paper announced, two months before the explosion of the USS Maine, that it had arranged for Evangelina's escape to the United States. To celebrate her arrival as a "Cuban Joan of Arc," Hearst organized a mass rally to which more than 75,000 New Yorkers arrived chanting "Viva Cuba Libre!"
In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the US agenda changed from justifying invasion to legitimating a continued military and economic presence. Accordingly, the representation of Cuba as a comely woman in distress--usually depicted, like Evangelina, as white in complexion (and thus a fair reflection of American virtue)--changed too. The mixed-race isle was now depicted in tabloid cartoons as a pitiable black child holding the hand of a beneficent Uncle Sam on the path to progress. Previously, US opponents of annexing Cuba had often based their arguments in racism. "The white inhabitants form too small a proportion of the whole number," as one diplomat put it in 1825; moreover, explained a Congressman in 1855, "the Spanish-Creole race...are utterly ignorant of the machinery of free institutions." Now the same logic justified a strong imperial hand. The Cubans, the commanding US general in the 1898 war declared, were "no more capable of self-government than the savages of Africa."
If once Cuba had figured as a virtuous lady in need of saving by an imperial enterprise cloaked in a mission civilitrice, it soon came to be seen as a different sort of woman, one whose mission was servicing others. "We gave Cuba her liberty," declared a US Army veteran on holiday in Havana in 1925, "and now we are going to enjoy it." The island's bustling main seaport had never been a stranger to prostitution. But as the tourist trade grew, so did Havana's reputation as "the brothel of the New World." The island "was like a woman in love," touted a typical travel writer's account, and "eager to give pleasure, she will be anything you want her to be." Simultaneously overseas and right next door, Cuba became the place where Americans--especially American men--went to escape the stolid mores of wife and home. With the passage of Prohibition in 1919, legal booze fortified Cuba's libertine lure. When It's Cocktail Time in Cuba was the title of a popular US tourist guide, and Havana bartenders concocted new rum-based elixirs like the Cuba Libre and mojito to coax more cash from Northern visitors. A short cruise from Florida--or, after Pan-American Airways launched its first international passenger route with Miami-Havana flights in 1928, an even shorter plane ride--Cuba was, by the 1930s, receiving more US visitors than even Canada.
By the time the US mob launched their Havana plot in earnest in 1946, tourism was already well established as a key portion of Cuba's economy. Mob designs for "the Monte Carlo of the Caribbean" evoked European playgrounds, with hotels named the Riviera, Deauville and Capri. But by the 1950s, "Havana" had acquired its own cachet for American consumers as both brand and idea. On television Desi Arnaz was the all-purpose Latin Lover, and advertisements hawked Havana perfume, Havana soft drinks, Havana lingerie. "Waving palms, a cool island breeze," went the slogan for El Paso brand Cuban Black Bean Dip. "Visit a forbidden paradise of silky black beans, sweet red pepper and an undercurrent of rich gold rum, resulting in a Cuban sensation that may taste mild, but is definitely hot, hot, hot!"
The cold war ended Havana's viability as marketing hook for consumers to the north. That it also made Cuba legally forbidden to American travelers, though, doubtless contributes to a still-thriving trade in Cuba-related books in the United States--volumes that (no matter their particular topic or politics) often find it impossible not to trade in shopworn clichés about pulsing rhythms and caramel skin and crashing waves on the Malecón. Even in a book like T.J. English's authoritative and otherwise sharply written Havana Nocturne, everything from Batista's facial features to the city's jazz scene is described as "exotic." Never mind that the cultures of Cuba and the United States have always been more deeply intertwined than partisans of either nation have sometimes cared to admit. The jazz bands that thrilled American tourists in 1950s Havana borrowed from the inventions of musicians in New York and Chicago; and no less a touchstone of Americana than rock 'n' roll, as the music historian Ned Sublette has convincingly shown, owed as much in its genesis to Cuban rhythms ringing out of Havana as it did to blues riffs busting out of Memphis or New Orleans. Indeed, for two centuries up until 1960, the cultures of New Orleans and Havana were joined and nurtured by the streams of migrants and goods flowing between them.
What the "exotic" label also tends to conceal about Cuba is that to its own people as well as outsiders, the island has long been as much an idea as a country. At least since José Martí, the great poet laureate of Cuban independence, began composing odes to the island's "half-breed" soul in the late 1800s, there has existed in Cuba an obsession with reflecting upon and debating the national character. This tradition is perhaps most memorably manifested in the seminal anthropologist Fernando Ortiz's argument, in Cuban Counterpoint (1940), that all of Cuban identity and culture--from the rumba to the mulata to the cigar--can be understood as outgrowths of an economy based in producing tobacco and sugar for export. The discussion has taken many forms, but perhaps the dominant current in Cuba's politics and intellectual culture has always been the struggle over cubanía, or Cubanness. Fidel's revolution, before it was Marxist-Leninist or Castroist or anything else, has always been framed and experienced in Cuba as a nationalist struggle. Accordingly, it was not solely on the grounds of Marxian virtue but also cubanía that Fidel battled cocaine and prostitution as "un-Cuban" in the 1960s (never mind the Havana Mob's avoidance of the drug trade, or that sex-for-pay held a prominent place in Cuban society long before its exploitation by yanquis) and contended, during the 1970s, that Cuba's military involvement in Angola and Mozambique was driven by Cuba's core identity as an "Afro-Latin" nation.
Fidel's custodianship of cubanía has deep roots in a much longer history of Cuban men of privilege (and usually light skin) defining the nation's identity. Batista was a mulatto cane-cutter's son; Fidel and his brother Raúl were the children of wealthy Spanish landowners--putative members, that is, of a class of Cubans who thought the déclassé rule of an uneducated army colonel a national shame. Not every member of Cuba's elite who came to support Castro against Batista in the 1950s was driven by prejudice; Fidel has always been a strong antiracist, in his way. But the machista worlds of elite Cuban politics and culture have always been paternalistic, whether in José Martí's wishful 1891 declaration that in Cuba "there are no races," or the longstanding tradition--from Nicolás Guillén's iconic 1930 poem "Mulata" to innumerable paintings of the copper-skinned Virgen de la Caridad--of holding up the sexy mulata as embodiment of cubanía, while affording to actual brown-skinned Cuban women little place in that nation beyond its brothels and kitchens.
After racial discrimination was officially banned in 1960 by his revolution, Fidel blithely declared that racism was defeated in Cuba. As in 1891, the actual situation was more complex. The masses of Afro-Cubans who'd lived in illiterate destitution since slavery--and seen 6,000 of their forebears massacred in a horrific 1912 race war--had the most to gain from socialist projects in housing, healthcare and education. That Cuba's 4 million blacks still provide a key base of Communist Party support is a measure of how much their lives have improved under Fidel. But as Carlos Moore writes in a poignant new memoir, Pichón, Castro's blind spots with regard to race have at times also been pernicious. Pichón takes its title from a Cuban slur for Jamaican and Haitian laborers who survived the Depression by scrounging for slaughterhouse scraps in the manner of ugly black buzzards, or pichónes. The book begins with Moore recounting a rural Cuban childhood of being tormented by the fists and epithets of white schoolmates. Then comes the story of his personal epic: leaving for New York City at 16 in the late 1950s and falling into the black radical demimonde of Maya Angelou and Malcolm X, then returning to Cuba as an ardent Fidel admirer in the early 1960s, only to be imprisoned and exiled by Fidel's revolution for daring to protest the race prejudice of certain of its ministers.
Moore renders this tragic tale with frank clarity. He met his mentor Angelou in a Harlem bookshop shortly after his arrival to the cosmopolis in 1958; scarcely two years later, he directed an occupation of the UN General Assembly to protest the US-sponsored killing of the Congolese freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba. It was during Castro's own 1960 visit to the UN--during which Fidel stayed at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem to convey solidarity with those oppressed by the US empire at home--that Moore decided it was his revolutionary duty to join the cause.
Returning to Havana in June 1961, Moore sought to put his skills as an English speaker to work at the Foreign Ministry. He became convinced that the bureaucrat denying his requests for a job was doing so on account of his dark skin, and he took the audacious step of traveling to a provincial army barracks to demand a meeting with the only Afro-Cuban member of Fidel's inner circle, the guerrilla hero Juán Almeida. Almeida indulged the headstrong youth with a warning to "stop talking as you do," but once back in Havana, Moore was "detailed" by the revolutionary police and tossed into a new jail made from a converted mansion on the city's outskirts. He was released a few weeks later with no charge or explanation and eventually found work in another branch of the government. But in late 1962, after some months of increasing disquiet about the revolution's puritanical excesses--with police sending homosexuals to labor camps and forcibly shuttering Afro-Cuban social clubs--Moore encountered his old nemesis in the Foreign Ministry. Furious that the young negrito was still at large, the bureaucrat promised to ensure that Moore was "take[n] care of" for good. That afternoon Moore knocked at the door of the Havana embassy of the new West African nation of Guinea and requested asylum; a few weeks later he left Cuba on a freighter bound for Africa. Eventually settling in Paris, he went on to write Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (1989), a controversial radical critique of the revolution's race mores whose exaggerated animus, given the experiences related in Moore's more personal and worthwhile memoir, is perhaps now clearer at its source.
When Moore went into exile in the early 1960s, most Cubans who fled the island belonged to its white upper classes. The arch-right-wingers among them nurtured a deep anger about Castro's "giving it all away" to the riffraff and pichónes. Their story is perhaps less tragic than that of exile families with more liberal pasts like the Bacardis, owners of the eponymous liquor empire, whose story Tom Gjelten traces in his splendid family chronicle Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba. The tale begins with the penniless Catalan immigrant Facundo Bacardi's discovering, in the 1860s, a new way to distill sugar cane into clear white rum. His son Emilio Bacardi became a key ally of José Martí in the fight for independence in the 1890s, and the Bacardis' 1950s heirs were fervid Fidel supporters--but then left the island and became fervid Castro-haters when he ordered a state takeover of the company they'd spent a century building from scratch. (One of Fidel's great claims to revolutionary virtue is that he did not spare his own parents' latifundio from being nationalized and split up in the first agrarian reform.) Family sagas about seized storehouses and abandoned mansions compose the sacred text of mainstream Cuban-exile politics. But as stories like Carlos Moore's show, belonging to a class of Cubans whose lot the revolution improved granted no exemption from being tyrannized by party discipline and hierarchy.
When Fidel Castro took command of Havana in January 1959, few in or outside Cuba knew much about him beyond his magnetism and rousing oratory; apart from Castro's loathing of Batista and idolizing of Martí, his politics--as the Eisenhower administration's "watch and wait" approach to his government shows--were vague even to close observers. Soon enough, his strident nationalism and messianic bent were clear. But even as Castro's government began seizing lands owned by US companies as part of its first agrarian reform in June 1959--and powerful Washington interests began urging Eisenhower to respond by ending the longstanding US agreement to purchase most of Cuba's sugar--few foresaw the antagonisms and escalation to come.
With Cuba's continued access to the chief market for its main crop looking unsure, and radicals like Che Guevara at Fidel's ear, whatever doubts Castro had about Leninism disappeared. In February 1960 a delegation of Soviet ministers arrived in Havana and signed an agreement to purchase much of Cuba's sugar; Che traveled to Moscow a short while later to secure Havana's ties to the Eastern Bloc. Three years after Khrushchev had promised "we will bury you," the Soviets had established a Communist beachhead in easy range of Florida, on an island, moreover, that the United States had regarded as an amour propre. The trauma was deep. In Washington a flurry of panicked recriminations over how this could have been allowed to happen--traced by Lars Schoultz with insightful verve in That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, a comprehensive history of US-Cuba relations since World War II--was translated into an ill-conceived CIA-sponsored invasion in April 1961. The Bay of Pigs fiasco did Fidel the great favor of allowing him to oversee the defeat of imperialist invaders on Cuba's beaches. In the months following, the Kennedy administration hatched a tragicomic series of attempts to kill Castro with explosive seashells and poisoned cigars (a job for which the CIA contracted the president's old Havana pimp, Santo Trafficante, now in Miami). But no matter. In October 1962, Washington's worst fears were realized when a US spy plane over Cuba's countryside snapped photos of Soviet missile launchers nestled amid royal palms.
Whether or not the Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous and direct confrontation of the cold war, it's clear that Cuba's role was that of pawn or prop. This did not comfort Castro, who harbored deep resentment when Khrushchev failed to consult him before Moscow agreed to remove its nuclear missiles--a reaction that reveals the particularly Cuban pathos of this puffed-up leader of a smallish island driven by the need to be treated and seen as head of a big powerful nation (or at least a sovereign one). The longstanding US irritation with Cuba, Schoultz observes, stems from its leaders' persistent denial of the base precept of political realism distilled in Thucydides' dictum that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Schoultz presents his history as a "case study in the trials and tribulations of realism"--an investigation into how for the past fifty years a weak state has "gotten away" with standing up to its vastly stronger neighbor and how, conversely, the stronger was made to let the weaker do so.
For three decades, of course, a large part of how Cuba "stood up" to the US empire lay also in its becoming the client state of another empire. This truth did not prevent Cuba from becoming a new kind of symbol across a Latin America long frustrated by the condescension of its Northern hegemon. Across the hemisphere, the mythic story of Cuba--a miraculous fable about a merry band of longhairs who went into their country's mountains and a few years later swept into its capital on the shoulders of its poor--was one that women and men who loved justice would seek to re-create from El Salvador to Colombia to Bolivia and Peru. In Washington, conversely, a new guiding metaphor for Cuba emerged: that of a malignant cancer whose spread had to be contained at all costs. And so it was that many thousands of those Latin Americans who went to the continent's jungles during the '60s, '70s and '80s, some toting photos of Che and Fidel in their knapsacks, died awful deaths with those whose cause they raised, too often the "disappeared" victims of US-backed dictatorships and death squads.
Since the cold war's end, US policy mavens have argued over the extent to which those dark decades' abuses were, if not justifiable, understandable given the strategic threat posed by the prospect of another Soviet satellite in its "backyard." What the years since the USSR's fall have also laid bare, however, is the extent to which Washington's approach to Cuba itself has been driven by other than simply rational aims like containment. "Castro is not merely an adversary, but an enemy," a 1993 report from the US Army War College observes, "an embodiment of evil who must be punished for his defiance of the United States.... There is a desire to hurt the enemy that is mirrored in the malevolence that Castro has exhibited towards us." For US politicians in national campaigns, being "tough on Cuba" long ago took its place with being "a friend to Israel" as a sine qua non of victory. As Cuba's potential threat to US security has progressively dwindled to nearly nil, US antagonism toward its government has only deepened. The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 codified the embargo as US law and was toughened in the Helms-Burton Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, which prohibited US companies from dealing with foreign firms engaged in business with Cuban property seized by the revolution, and also mandated that the embargo could not be lifted until such time as Cuba is run by a government "that does not include Fidel Castro or Raúl Castro."
More recently, George W. Bush, who owed his presidency to south Florida, used his office in 2004 to funnel $59 million in new funding to no-bid Miami-Cuban boondoggles like the propaganda networks Radio and TV Martí. He also moved to close one of the embargo's few loopholes by introducing strict limits on remittances Cuban-Americans may send to family members on the island and on the number of trips they may take to visit them. Bush also placed Cuba on the US list of "state sponsors of terror" (based on an alleged chemical weapons program whose existence his own State Department doubted) and, in the long run-up to the 2004 election, established, at the heart of the executive branch and under the chairmanship of Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. It was charged with determining how "to hasten the end" of the Castro dictatorship and in May 2004 produced a report recommending, for example, that in the wake of an anticipated violent transition, Cuban schools be kept open "in order to keep children and teenagers off the streets."
As Daniel Erikson shows in The Cuba Wars, a sharp and deeply reported account of dynamics informing US-Cuba policy since the Clinton administration, Castro's government was concerned that Cuba's involvement in Bush's "war on terror" would go beyond the United States' use of its imperial relic at Guantánamo Bay to hold certain prisoners beyond the jurisdiction of US courts. The Cubans "were really worried," Lawrence Wilkerson, longtime chief of staff to Colin Powell, tells Erikson of a visit he made to Havana just after leaving the State Department in 2005. "They wanted me first of all to assure them that we weren't going to invade." In the spring of 2003, Fidel Castro--practiced in paranoia, always more comfortable on a war footing than not--responded to the new provocations by ordering the trial for treason of some seventy-five "dissidents," some of whom were indeed Cubans being paid by the United States to tweak (if hardly, in practice, to destabilize) their government, but most of whose offenses amounted to writing articles and circulating petitions. Some fifty-odd of "the 75" remain jailed today.
In 2003 I was living in Havana, and as at so many other times when Cuba had become the subject of hyperventilated fits abroad, the arrests and diplomatic volleys were little more than background noise to the struggles of quotidian life. People who sought more food than allotted by their ration card broke the law daily. That spring, an architect I was friendly with began selling stolen shellfish to feed his family, and his cousin had taken to earning new clothes by satisfying the bedroom predilections of Italian sex tourists. More significant to Cubans than Washington's longstanding obsession with upending their government were concerns over what that government might do to repair a broken economy. Such grave ills aside, not a few Cubans remain proud that theirs is a poor country in which "no children sleep in the streets," as a propaganda billboard near my Havana apartment touted truly. The Communist Party enjoys significant support, especially in the provincias--where peasants fifty years ago lived in dirt-floored huts and still do so today, but now regard free healthcare for their parents and good schools for their kids as birthrights. More generally, it's open to debate whether the Cuban state's solicitude toward its young and its aged is "worth" the repression too often endured by everyone else. But from the standpoint of a failed fifty-year attempt by the United States to change the island's government by isolation, the salient facts about Cuba are that it enjoys good relations and strong economic ties to every other country in the hemisphere, including Canada (not to mention China and the European Union), and that it has a stable government, in evidently firm control of its military and police, which has carried off its recent change to a new head of state with apparently minimal fuss.
Raúl Castro--longtime head of Cuba's military, a dour party man--has, with the illness of his brother, been cast in the unlikely role of reformer. Many in Cuba express hope that Raúl's early gestures at reform, like his opening of the grounds of tourist hotels such as the Hotel Nacional to ordinary Cubans, may augur a larger opening of the Cuban economy. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama called Raúl's bluff by suggesting that he'd be willing to sit down with Cuba's new leader with a view toward improving relations. Realists predictably think this prospect, like Raúl's proffering of Cuba's "willingness to discuss on equal footing the prolonged dispute" with the United States, is a nonstarter: Obama's secretary of state, back when she was not his head diplomat but primary rival, called his willingness to meet with "foreign dictators" like Cuba's new leader "irresponsible." But during its first weeks, the Obama administration--no doubt cognizant of polls showing that younger Cuban-Americans voice little support for the hardline stance of the past, and that even a symbolic thaw with Cuba would be an easy way to improve relations with the rest of Latin America--successfully marshaled a bill through Congress overturning Bush-era restrictions on family visits and remittances. All this move does is return the United States' Cuba policy to its 2003 status. But it was a key signal that a larger overhaul of the Cuba policy will be on the table in Obama's Washington. At April's Summit of the Americas, the president observed that Cuba's thousands of doctors dispersed throughout the region were "a reminder for us in the United States that if our only interaction with many of these countries is...military, then we may not be developing the connections that can, over time, increase our influence." Obama also declared that a "new beginning with Cuba" could be near. That initial signal, it seems, has been confirmed.
In 1891, José Martí, the most articulate of Cuban nationalists and also perhaps his generation's most perceptive writer on inter-American relations, wrote in Nuestra América, "One must not attribute, through a provincial antipathy, a fatal and inbred wickedness to the continent's fair-skinned nation simply because it does not speak our language, or see the world as we see it, or resemble us in its political defects, so different from our own." For many Cubans, the election of Obama represents an overcoming of political defects, and in his brown face they see not a "fair-skinned nation" but something of themselves; their hope is that Obama will be a leader free of many of his country's old neuroses. The ultimate test of those hopes will be ending the long-running embargo, which Wilkerson, expressing a widely held but rarely stated Washington view, called, in an interview with GQ, "the dumbest policy on the face of the earth." No less incontestable is a remark made in 1974 by the now-ailing barbudo in Havana, who recently expressed doubt that he'd live to see the end of Obama's first term. "We cannot move, nor can the United States," Fidel Castro observed in an interview. "Speaking realistically, someday some sort of ties will have to be established."
About Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a doctoral student in geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba...andThen Lost It to the Revolution
by T.J. English
Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos
by Louis A. Perez Jr
Pichon: Race and Revolution in Castro's Cuba, a Memoir
by Carlos Moore
Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause
by Tom Gjelten
That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution
by Lars Schoultz
The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution
by Daniel P. Erikson
Three days before Christmas in 1946, Havana's Hotel Nacional was closed for a private meeting. Armed guards blocked entry to its lovely grounds atop a seaside bluff in the plush El Vedado district. Inside the stately cream-colored Art Deco hotel, a group of distinguished foreign visitors tucked into a feast of local delicacies. There were crab and queen conch enchiladas from the southern archipelago; swordfish and oysters from the nearby village of Cojímar; roast breast of flamingo and tortoise stew; grilled manatee, washed down with añejo rum. It is unknown whether the attendees--whose number included about twenty of North America's most notorious gangsters--ended their meal with a cake like the one served at their feast's fictional rendering in The Godfather Part II. But as in the film, the purpose of the gathering was clear: to divvy up shares in the empire of vice they were busy establishing in Havana.
During the next decade, the mafia built a seaside gambling resort, which soon rivaled in profits and glamour its sister project in dusty Las Vegas. Under the canny direction of Meyer Lansky, the Jewish don who'd risen from the streets of New York's Lower East Side, members of the Havana Mob became fabulously wealthy. So too did Cuba's US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, whose stake in the mob's affairs exceeded the sacks of cash delivered weekly to the presidential palace. With Lansky and fellow mobsters like Santo Trafficante employed as "tourism experts" in his government, Batista eliminated taxes on the tourism industry, guaranteed public financing for hotel construction and--as T.J. English shows in Havana Nocturne, an exacting and lively account of the era--even granted responsibility for Cuba's infrastructure development to a new mob-controlled bank, BANDES. In December 1957 the opening of the Riviera, a $14 million mafia show palace just down the seawall from the Nacional, was celebrated by a special episode of The Steve Allen Show on US television and a gala in Havana featuring Ginger Rogers. Three months later, the twenty-five-story Havana Hilton--mortgage holder: BANDES--became Cuba's biggest hotel yet.
The party ended on New Year's 1959, when Batista fled the island as Fidel Castro's barbudos advanced on its capital. Castro and his bearded rebels established their headquarters in the Havana Hilton and loosed a truckload of pigs on the sleek lobby of the Riviera. Castro announced the "socialist nature" of his revolution. Nikita Khrushchev sent Soviet missiles. President John F. Kennedy--who, during a visit to Havana the previous year as a senator, had spent an afternoon with three mob-supplied prostitutes under the gaze, from behind a two-way hotel-room mirror, of Santo Trafficante--instituted the embargo that defines US-Cuba relations to this day.
"I couldn't get that little island off of my mind," Lansky remarked after his first visit to Cuba in the 1920s. The gangster was no less covetous of Cuba, and proved no less fixated on controlling it, than a series of US presidents reaching back to the founders. "I have ever looked on Cuba," wrote Thomas Jefferson to President James Monroe when the United States gained control of the Florida peninsula in 1821, "as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States." Monroe's secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, was more blunt. "The annexation of Cuba to our federal republic," he wrote, "will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself." After the United States took possession of Texas and California by war in 1848, many in Washington advocated annexing Cuba by force as well. The impulse was quashed for a time. Nevertheless, with Spain's empire sunk in a long decline, the United States' eventual possession of Cuba was viewed as inevitable for most of the nineteenth century. In a political cartoon from 1897, one of a trove of such images Louis A. Pérez Jr. uses to illustrate his brilliant book Cuba in the American Imagination, Uncle Sam stands beneath a fruit tree with a basket of plums, each bearing the name of a foreign territory already attained--Louisiana, Florida, Texas. From an upper branch hangs a "Cuba" plum, upon which Sam gazes keenly, his look distilling the common view: if America refrained from picking Cuba with a forceful hand, the ripe prize would eventually fall to its basket simply by dint of geography and time.
When the warship USS Maine mysteriously exploded while docked at Spanish Havana in February 1898, the United States had a pretext for shaking the tree of its remaining fruit. A few months later, Cuban rebels and invading US forces expelled Spain from the island, and Cuba (along with Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines) was annexed to the United States. "We went to war for civilization and humanity," President William McKinley eulogized, "to relieve our oppressed neighbors in Cuba." Humanity's gains were hazy, but what the United States certainly gained from the war was an empire. Puerto Rico and the Philippines became de facto American colonies; and with the passage of the Platt Amendment in 1901, Washington arrogated to itself the right to intervene in Cuba's affairs whenever it wished--providing also for the seizure of Cuban territory at Guantánamo Bay to establish a US naval base purposed "to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba" (and conveniently positioned to protect what would soon be a key sea lane to the Panama Canal).
Gaining control of Cuba fulfilled a long-sought strategic aim. But equally important for the United States was how the invasion of Cuba came to shape its foreign policy and self-image at large. The Spanish-American War--the Union's first large-scale military campaign since Reconstruction--bolstered American unity and inaugurated America's self-conception as a "universal nation" endowed with the moral mission of projecting its power abroad. Before 1898, as Pérez stresses, quoting the historian Norman Graebner, "the foreign policies of the United States were rendered solvent by ample power to cover limited, largely hemispheric, goals." Afterward, those policies became global, their stated aims--universal democracy and freedom for all humanity--abstract in nature and unobtainable in practice. As Pérez writes, the template for US foreign wars, up to the "war on terror," with its crusading aim to "rid the world of evil," was cast in America's war for Cuba.
The argument that the Spanish-American War was a watershed in the United States' fashioning of its national identity isn't new. The value of Pérez's study--the latest in a series of perceptive books on US-Cuba relations by this prolific historian--is to illustrate how an avid US self-interest was transformed into selfless moral enactment. While Cuba in the American Imagination is hampered by confusing chronology, Pérez shows clearly how in the late nineteenth century politicians in the United States and their allies in the press employed language--and a series of figurative metaphors specifically--to nurture in Americans' minds a conception of Cuba as object and stage for fulfilling the United States' imperial destiny. Early on, there was the image of Cuba as ripening fruit that would "naturally" and inevitably one day be Uncle Sam's. Later came references to Cuba as "our Armenia," implying that the United States, by defending Cuba's rebels against Madrid's repression, could prove its humanitarian mettle where Europe's nations had failed to prevent the recent Armenian genocide at their door. And finally, as invasion approached, there were invocations of Cuba as a virtuous lady whose protection against Spain's depredations was a test of American manhood.
This last figure was yanked out of the political funny pages and foisted upon Evangelina Cossío Cisneros, the 18-year-old daughter of a Cuban rebel leader purportedly arrested for sedition in August 1897 who was also, according to William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, "the most beautiful girl in the island." Evangelina's picture became a tabloid staple, her ordeal at the hands of her captors the topic of regular lurid updates. The melodrama ended only when Hearst's paper announced, two months before the explosion of the USS Maine, that it had arranged for Evangelina's escape to the United States. To celebrate her arrival as a "Cuban Joan of Arc," Hearst organized a mass rally to which more than 75,000 New Yorkers arrived chanting "Viva Cuba Libre!"
In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the US agenda changed from justifying invasion to legitimating a continued military and economic presence. Accordingly, the representation of Cuba as a comely woman in distress--usually depicted, like Evangelina, as white in complexion (and thus a fair reflection of American virtue)--changed too. The mixed-race isle was now depicted in tabloid cartoons as a pitiable black child holding the hand of a beneficent Uncle Sam on the path to progress. Previously, US opponents of annexing Cuba had often based their arguments in racism. "The white inhabitants form too small a proportion of the whole number," as one diplomat put it in 1825; moreover, explained a Congressman in 1855, "the Spanish-Creole race...are utterly ignorant of the machinery of free institutions." Now the same logic justified a strong imperial hand. The Cubans, the commanding US general in the 1898 war declared, were "no more capable of self-government than the savages of Africa."
If once Cuba had figured as a virtuous lady in need of saving by an imperial enterprise cloaked in a mission civilitrice, it soon came to be seen as a different sort of woman, one whose mission was servicing others. "We gave Cuba her liberty," declared a US Army veteran on holiday in Havana in 1925, "and now we are going to enjoy it." The island's bustling main seaport had never been a stranger to prostitution. But as the tourist trade grew, so did Havana's reputation as "the brothel of the New World." The island "was like a woman in love," touted a typical travel writer's account, and "eager to give pleasure, she will be anything you want her to be." Simultaneously overseas and right next door, Cuba became the place where Americans--especially American men--went to escape the stolid mores of wife and home. With the passage of Prohibition in 1919, legal booze fortified Cuba's libertine lure. When It's Cocktail Time in Cuba was the title of a popular US tourist guide, and Havana bartenders concocted new rum-based elixirs like the Cuba Libre and mojito to coax more cash from Northern visitors. A short cruise from Florida--or, after Pan-American Airways launched its first international passenger route with Miami-Havana flights in 1928, an even shorter plane ride--Cuba was, by the 1930s, receiving more US visitors than even Canada.
By the time the US mob launched their Havana plot in earnest in 1946, tourism was already well established as a key portion of Cuba's economy. Mob designs for "the Monte Carlo of the Caribbean" evoked European playgrounds, with hotels named the Riviera, Deauville and Capri. But by the 1950s, "Havana" had acquired its own cachet for American consumers as both brand and idea. On television Desi Arnaz was the all-purpose Latin Lover, and advertisements hawked Havana perfume, Havana soft drinks, Havana lingerie. "Waving palms, a cool island breeze," went the slogan for El Paso brand Cuban Black Bean Dip. "Visit a forbidden paradise of silky black beans, sweet red pepper and an undercurrent of rich gold rum, resulting in a Cuban sensation that may taste mild, but is definitely hot, hot, hot!"
The cold war ended Havana's viability as marketing hook for consumers to the north. That it also made Cuba legally forbidden to American travelers, though, doubtless contributes to a still-thriving trade in Cuba-related books in the United States--volumes that (no matter their particular topic or politics) often find it impossible not to trade in shopworn clichés about pulsing rhythms and caramel skin and crashing waves on the Malecón. Even in a book like T.J. English's authoritative and otherwise sharply written Havana Nocturne, everything from Batista's facial features to the city's jazz scene is described as "exotic." Never mind that the cultures of Cuba and the United States have always been more deeply intertwined than partisans of either nation have sometimes cared to admit. The jazz bands that thrilled American tourists in 1950s Havana borrowed from the inventions of musicians in New York and Chicago; and no less a touchstone of Americana than rock 'n' roll, as the music historian Ned Sublette has convincingly shown, owed as much in its genesis to Cuban rhythms ringing out of Havana as it did to blues riffs busting out of Memphis or New Orleans. Indeed, for two centuries up until 1960, the cultures of New Orleans and Havana were joined and nurtured by the streams of migrants and goods flowing between them.
What the "exotic" label also tends to conceal about Cuba is that to its own people as well as outsiders, the island has long been as much an idea as a country. At least since José Martí, the great poet laureate of Cuban independence, began composing odes to the island's "half-breed" soul in the late 1800s, there has existed in Cuba an obsession with reflecting upon and debating the national character. This tradition is perhaps most memorably manifested in the seminal anthropologist Fernando Ortiz's argument, in Cuban Counterpoint (1940), that all of Cuban identity and culture--from the rumba to the mulata to the cigar--can be understood as outgrowths of an economy based in producing tobacco and sugar for export. The discussion has taken many forms, but perhaps the dominant current in Cuba's politics and intellectual culture has always been the struggle over cubanía, or Cubanness. Fidel's revolution, before it was Marxist-Leninist or Castroist or anything else, has always been framed and experienced in Cuba as a nationalist struggle. Accordingly, it was not solely on the grounds of Marxian virtue but also cubanía that Fidel battled cocaine and prostitution as "un-Cuban" in the 1960s (never mind the Havana Mob's avoidance of the drug trade, or that sex-for-pay held a prominent place in Cuban society long before its exploitation by yanquis) and contended, during the 1970s, that Cuba's military involvement in Angola and Mozambique was driven by Cuba's core identity as an "Afro-Latin" nation.
Fidel's custodianship of cubanía has deep roots in a much longer history of Cuban men of privilege (and usually light skin) defining the nation's identity. Batista was a mulatto cane-cutter's son; Fidel and his brother Raúl were the children of wealthy Spanish landowners--putative members, that is, of a class of Cubans who thought the déclassé rule of an uneducated army colonel a national shame. Not every member of Cuba's elite who came to support Castro against Batista in the 1950s was driven by prejudice; Fidel has always been a strong antiracist, in his way. But the machista worlds of elite Cuban politics and culture have always been paternalistic, whether in José Martí's wishful 1891 declaration that in Cuba "there are no races," or the longstanding tradition--from Nicolás Guillén's iconic 1930 poem "Mulata" to innumerable paintings of the copper-skinned Virgen de la Caridad--of holding up the sexy mulata as embodiment of cubanía, while affording to actual brown-skinned Cuban women little place in that nation beyond its brothels and kitchens.
After racial discrimination was officially banned in 1960 by his revolution, Fidel blithely declared that racism was defeated in Cuba. As in 1891, the actual situation was more complex. The masses of Afro-Cubans who'd lived in illiterate destitution since slavery--and seen 6,000 of their forebears massacred in a horrific 1912 race war--had the most to gain from socialist projects in housing, healthcare and education. That Cuba's 4 million blacks still provide a key base of Communist Party support is a measure of how much their lives have improved under Fidel. But as Carlos Moore writes in a poignant new memoir, Pichón, Castro's blind spots with regard to race have at times also been pernicious. Pichón takes its title from a Cuban slur for Jamaican and Haitian laborers who survived the Depression by scrounging for slaughterhouse scraps in the manner of ugly black buzzards, or pichónes. The book begins with Moore recounting a rural Cuban childhood of being tormented by the fists and epithets of white schoolmates. Then comes the story of his personal epic: leaving for New York City at 16 in the late 1950s and falling into the black radical demimonde of Maya Angelou and Malcolm X, then returning to Cuba as an ardent Fidel admirer in the early 1960s, only to be imprisoned and exiled by Fidel's revolution for daring to protest the race prejudice of certain of its ministers.
Moore renders this tragic tale with frank clarity. He met his mentor Angelou in a Harlem bookshop shortly after his arrival to the cosmopolis in 1958; scarcely two years later, he directed an occupation of the UN General Assembly to protest the US-sponsored killing of the Congolese freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba. It was during Castro's own 1960 visit to the UN--during which Fidel stayed at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem to convey solidarity with those oppressed by the US empire at home--that Moore decided it was his revolutionary duty to join the cause.
Returning to Havana in June 1961, Moore sought to put his skills as an English speaker to work at the Foreign Ministry. He became convinced that the bureaucrat denying his requests for a job was doing so on account of his dark skin, and he took the audacious step of traveling to a provincial army barracks to demand a meeting with the only Afro-Cuban member of Fidel's inner circle, the guerrilla hero Juán Almeida. Almeida indulged the headstrong youth with a warning to "stop talking as you do," but once back in Havana, Moore was "detailed" by the revolutionary police and tossed into a new jail made from a converted mansion on the city's outskirts. He was released a few weeks later with no charge or explanation and eventually found work in another branch of the government. But in late 1962, after some months of increasing disquiet about the revolution's puritanical excesses--with police sending homosexuals to labor camps and forcibly shuttering Afro-Cuban social clubs--Moore encountered his old nemesis in the Foreign Ministry. Furious that the young negrito was still at large, the bureaucrat promised to ensure that Moore was "take[n] care of" for good. That afternoon Moore knocked at the door of the Havana embassy of the new West African nation of Guinea and requested asylum; a few weeks later he left Cuba on a freighter bound for Africa. Eventually settling in Paris, he went on to write Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (1989), a controversial radical critique of the revolution's race mores whose exaggerated animus, given the experiences related in Moore's more personal and worthwhile memoir, is perhaps now clearer at its source.
When Moore went into exile in the early 1960s, most Cubans who fled the island belonged to its white upper classes. The arch-right-wingers among them nurtured a deep anger about Castro's "giving it all away" to the riffraff and pichónes. Their story is perhaps less tragic than that of exile families with more liberal pasts like the Bacardis, owners of the eponymous liquor empire, whose story Tom Gjelten traces in his splendid family chronicle Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba. The tale begins with the penniless Catalan immigrant Facundo Bacardi's discovering, in the 1860s, a new way to distill sugar cane into clear white rum. His son Emilio Bacardi became a key ally of José Martí in the fight for independence in the 1890s, and the Bacardis' 1950s heirs were fervid Fidel supporters--but then left the island and became fervid Castro-haters when he ordered a state takeover of the company they'd spent a century building from scratch. (One of Fidel's great claims to revolutionary virtue is that he did not spare his own parents' latifundio from being nationalized and split up in the first agrarian reform.) Family sagas about seized storehouses and abandoned mansions compose the sacred text of mainstream Cuban-exile politics. But as stories like Carlos Moore's show, belonging to a class of Cubans whose lot the revolution improved granted no exemption from being tyrannized by party discipline and hierarchy.
When Fidel Castro took command of Havana in January 1959, few in or outside Cuba knew much about him beyond his magnetism and rousing oratory; apart from Castro's loathing of Batista and idolizing of Martí, his politics--as the Eisenhower administration's "watch and wait" approach to his government shows--were vague even to close observers. Soon enough, his strident nationalism and messianic bent were clear. But even as Castro's government began seizing lands owned by US companies as part of its first agrarian reform in June 1959--and powerful Washington interests began urging Eisenhower to respond by ending the longstanding US agreement to purchase most of Cuba's sugar--few foresaw the antagonisms and escalation to come.
With Cuba's continued access to the chief market for its main crop looking unsure, and radicals like Che Guevara at Fidel's ear, whatever doubts Castro had about Leninism disappeared. In February 1960 a delegation of Soviet ministers arrived in Havana and signed an agreement to purchase much of Cuba's sugar; Che traveled to Moscow a short while later to secure Havana's ties to the Eastern Bloc. Three years after Khrushchev had promised "we will bury you," the Soviets had established a Communist beachhead in easy range of Florida, on an island, moreover, that the United States had regarded as an amour propre. The trauma was deep. In Washington a flurry of panicked recriminations over how this could have been allowed to happen--traced by Lars Schoultz with insightful verve in That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, a comprehensive history of US-Cuba relations since World War II--was translated into an ill-conceived CIA-sponsored invasion in April 1961. The Bay of Pigs fiasco did Fidel the great favor of allowing him to oversee the defeat of imperialist invaders on Cuba's beaches. In the months following, the Kennedy administration hatched a tragicomic series of attempts to kill Castro with explosive seashells and poisoned cigars (a job for which the CIA contracted the president's old Havana pimp, Santo Trafficante, now in Miami). But no matter. In October 1962, Washington's worst fears were realized when a US spy plane over Cuba's countryside snapped photos of Soviet missile launchers nestled amid royal palms.
Whether or not the Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous and direct confrontation of the cold war, it's clear that Cuba's role was that of pawn or prop. This did not comfort Castro, who harbored deep resentment when Khrushchev failed to consult him before Moscow agreed to remove its nuclear missiles--a reaction that reveals the particularly Cuban pathos of this puffed-up leader of a smallish island driven by the need to be treated and seen as head of a big powerful nation (or at least a sovereign one). The longstanding US irritation with Cuba, Schoultz observes, stems from its leaders' persistent denial of the base precept of political realism distilled in Thucydides' dictum that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Schoultz presents his history as a "case study in the trials and tribulations of realism"--an investigation into how for the past fifty years a weak state has "gotten away" with standing up to its vastly stronger neighbor and how, conversely, the stronger was made to let the weaker do so.
For three decades, of course, a large part of how Cuba "stood up" to the US empire lay also in its becoming the client state of another empire. This truth did not prevent Cuba from becoming a new kind of symbol across a Latin America long frustrated by the condescension of its Northern hegemon. Across the hemisphere, the mythic story of Cuba--a miraculous fable about a merry band of longhairs who went into their country's mountains and a few years later swept into its capital on the shoulders of its poor--was one that women and men who loved justice would seek to re-create from El Salvador to Colombia to Bolivia and Peru. In Washington, conversely, a new guiding metaphor for Cuba emerged: that of a malignant cancer whose spread had to be contained at all costs. And so it was that many thousands of those Latin Americans who went to the continent's jungles during the '60s, '70s and '80s, some toting photos of Che and Fidel in their knapsacks, died awful deaths with those whose cause they raised, too often the "disappeared" victims of US-backed dictatorships and death squads.
Since the cold war's end, US policy mavens have argued over the extent to which those dark decades' abuses were, if not justifiable, understandable given the strategic threat posed by the prospect of another Soviet satellite in its "backyard." What the years since the USSR's fall have also laid bare, however, is the extent to which Washington's approach to Cuba itself has been driven by other than simply rational aims like containment. "Castro is not merely an adversary, but an enemy," a 1993 report from the US Army War College observes, "an embodiment of evil who must be punished for his defiance of the United States.... There is a desire to hurt the enemy that is mirrored in the malevolence that Castro has exhibited towards us." For US politicians in national campaigns, being "tough on Cuba" long ago took its place with being "a friend to Israel" as a sine qua non of victory. As Cuba's potential threat to US security has progressively dwindled to nearly nil, US antagonism toward its government has only deepened. The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 codified the embargo as US law and was toughened in the Helms-Burton Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, which prohibited US companies from dealing with foreign firms engaged in business with Cuban property seized by the revolution, and also mandated that the embargo could not be lifted until such time as Cuba is run by a government "that does not include Fidel Castro or Raúl Castro."
More recently, George W. Bush, who owed his presidency to south Florida, used his office in 2004 to funnel $59 million in new funding to no-bid Miami-Cuban boondoggles like the propaganda networks Radio and TV Martí. He also moved to close one of the embargo's few loopholes by introducing strict limits on remittances Cuban-Americans may send to family members on the island and on the number of trips they may take to visit them. Bush also placed Cuba on the US list of "state sponsors of terror" (based on an alleged chemical weapons program whose existence his own State Department doubted) and, in the long run-up to the 2004 election, established, at the heart of the executive branch and under the chairmanship of Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. It was charged with determining how "to hasten the end" of the Castro dictatorship and in May 2004 produced a report recommending, for example, that in the wake of an anticipated violent transition, Cuban schools be kept open "in order to keep children and teenagers off the streets."
As Daniel Erikson shows in The Cuba Wars, a sharp and deeply reported account of dynamics informing US-Cuba policy since the Clinton administration, Castro's government was concerned that Cuba's involvement in Bush's "war on terror" would go beyond the United States' use of its imperial relic at Guantánamo Bay to hold certain prisoners beyond the jurisdiction of US courts. The Cubans "were really worried," Lawrence Wilkerson, longtime chief of staff to Colin Powell, tells Erikson of a visit he made to Havana just after leaving the State Department in 2005. "They wanted me first of all to assure them that we weren't going to invade." In the spring of 2003, Fidel Castro--practiced in paranoia, always more comfortable on a war footing than not--responded to the new provocations by ordering the trial for treason of some seventy-five "dissidents," some of whom were indeed Cubans being paid by the United States to tweak (if hardly, in practice, to destabilize) their government, but most of whose offenses amounted to writing articles and circulating petitions. Some fifty-odd of "the 75" remain jailed today.
In 2003 I was living in Havana, and as at so many other times when Cuba had become the subject of hyperventilated fits abroad, the arrests and diplomatic volleys were little more than background noise to the struggles of quotidian life. People who sought more food than allotted by their ration card broke the law daily. That spring, an architect I was friendly with began selling stolen shellfish to feed his family, and his cousin had taken to earning new clothes by satisfying the bedroom predilections of Italian sex tourists. More significant to Cubans than Washington's longstanding obsession with upending their government were concerns over what that government might do to repair a broken economy. Such grave ills aside, not a few Cubans remain proud that theirs is a poor country in which "no children sleep in the streets," as a propaganda billboard near my Havana apartment touted truly. The Communist Party enjoys significant support, especially in the provincias--where peasants fifty years ago lived in dirt-floored huts and still do so today, but now regard free healthcare for their parents and good schools for their kids as birthrights. More generally, it's open to debate whether the Cuban state's solicitude toward its young and its aged is "worth" the repression too often endured by everyone else. But from the standpoint of a failed fifty-year attempt by the United States to change the island's government by isolation, the salient facts about Cuba are that it enjoys good relations and strong economic ties to every other country in the hemisphere, including Canada (not to mention China and the European Union), and that it has a stable government, in evidently firm control of its military and police, which has carried off its recent change to a new head of state with apparently minimal fuss.
Raúl Castro--longtime head of Cuba's military, a dour party man--has, with the illness of his brother, been cast in the unlikely role of reformer. Many in Cuba express hope that Raúl's early gestures at reform, like his opening of the grounds of tourist hotels such as the Hotel Nacional to ordinary Cubans, may augur a larger opening of the Cuban economy. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama called Raúl's bluff by suggesting that he'd be willing to sit down with Cuba's new leader with a view toward improving relations. Realists predictably think this prospect, like Raúl's proffering of Cuba's "willingness to discuss on equal footing the prolonged dispute" with the United States, is a nonstarter: Obama's secretary of state, back when she was not his head diplomat but primary rival, called his willingness to meet with "foreign dictators" like Cuba's new leader "irresponsible." But during its first weeks, the Obama administration--no doubt cognizant of polls showing that younger Cuban-Americans voice little support for the hardline stance of the past, and that even a symbolic thaw with Cuba would be an easy way to improve relations with the rest of Latin America--successfully marshaled a bill through Congress overturning Bush-era restrictions on family visits and remittances. All this move does is return the United States' Cuba policy to its 2003 status. But it was a key signal that a larger overhaul of the Cuba policy will be on the table in Obama's Washington. At April's Summit of the Americas, the president observed that Cuba's thousands of doctors dispersed throughout the region were "a reminder for us in the United States that if our only interaction with many of these countries is...military, then we may not be developing the connections that can, over time, increase our influence." Obama also declared that a "new beginning with Cuba" could be near. That initial signal, it seems, has been confirmed.
In 1891, José Martí, the most articulate of Cuban nationalists and also perhaps his generation's most perceptive writer on inter-American relations, wrote in Nuestra América, "One must not attribute, through a provincial antipathy, a fatal and inbred wickedness to the continent's fair-skinned nation simply because it does not speak our language, or see the world as we see it, or resemble us in its political defects, so different from our own." For many Cubans, the election of Obama represents an overcoming of political defects, and in his brown face they see not a "fair-skinned nation" but something of themselves; their hope is that Obama will be a leader free of many of his country's old neuroses. The ultimate test of those hopes will be ending the long-running embargo, which Wilkerson, expressing a widely held but rarely stated Washington view, called, in an interview with GQ, "the dumbest policy on the face of the earth." No less incontestable is a remark made in 1974 by the now-ailing barbudo in Havana, who recently expressed doubt that he'd live to see the end of Obama's first term. "We cannot move, nor can the United States," Fidel Castro observed in an interview. "Speaking realistically, someday some sort of ties will have to be established."
About Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a doctoral student in geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
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