Category Archives: Foreign Relations

So, Fidel Castro is dead

Posted by on November 26, 2016 Comments Off on So, Fidel Castro is dead

As one wag on twitter said, everyone’s opinion will differ with everyone else’s opinion. We see video of Cuban exiles celebrating in Miami, while Havana is somber. Some thoughts:
castro
As one wag on twitter said, everyone’s opinion will differ with everyone else’s opinion. We see video of Cuban exiles celebrating in Miami, while Havana is somber. Some thoughts:
1. While Cubans are very racially mixed, the people in the streets of Miami are generally descendants of the Spanish conquerors, while those who supported Castro were generally descendants of African slaves.
2. Before Castro’s revolution, the Spanish Cubans were on top of the economy and political system, and they created enormous wealth, but at the cost of racial division and economic inequality that exceeded what we have here. They were in power democratically and then by corrupt dictatorship, as Fulgencio Batista210px-fulgencio_batista_president_of_cuba_1952 took power in a military coup before the 1952 election.
3. After the revolution, the economic and political systems were overturned. A new group took control of the systems and created greater equality of access, but at the cost of a far more brutal autocracy. Literacy rose to the highest level in the Western hemisphere, so that people could read the government publications (propaganda). Healthcare was expanded to be universal.
4. Although ideological management of the economy and the impact of the US boycott both contributed to the impoverishment of the population, those who remained had little incentive to trade one for the other. And, before all those effects were felt, they had zero incentive to permit the return of the Batista regime so the population never rose up in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
5. In the fall of 1975 I was living in France, and a leftist friend came up to me all excited to announce that Franco (dictator of Spain)

franco-1had died. I looked at her. “What are you so excited about? While we don’t know if he was happy, he had wealth and power and died in his bed at 83? What is there to celebrate?” I feel about the same way regarding Castro.
6. Obama’s opening to Cuba was fortuitous, coming at the precise right moment, before Fidel Castro’s death and his brother Raul’s eventual death as well.raul-castro His opening is a counterpoint to hardliners on the island who will want to continue the relationship of the past half century. Whether Obama’s successor will move forward or revert to earlier failed US policies remains to be seen.

Good guys and bad guys

Posted by on January 1, 2015 Comments Off on Good guys and bad guys

Nearly 30 years ago Robert Fulghum wrote a best-selling book entitled “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” While I did not read the book, much of the wit and wisdom became part of popular culture at the time. In a similar vein, when I was in elementary school, we learned about good guys and bad guys. In our recreation periods, we played games, taking the roles of one or the other, in Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, and Yankees and Rebels. Neither role was uniformly bad or good—it was a matter of perception—everyone took turns at both roles in the game. However, we did learn that there were good guys and bad guys in the world, and we learned that it was not always easy to tell which was which.

There is much in the last year to which that lesson applies. One example is the ongoing Syrian Civil War, which has victimized hundreds of thousands of civilians, who have been wounded, raped, and driven from their homes by the combatants. At the outset Syria was a majority Sunni Muslim country ruled by a brutal Shia Muslim (Alawite) dictator. The armed opposition was largely Sunni. Among them were some relatively secular Sunni elements as well as the Al-Nusra brigades (aligned with Al-Qaeda) and ISIS (broken off from Al Qaeda). All of these groups use captured weapons, many captured from recipients of US suppliers.

Here is an example where there are so many bad guys, it is hard to know where to help the good guys, if there are any. We tend to favor secular groups. It is unclear whether those groups are adequately trained and motivated against a minority regime fighting to stave off ethnic and political disaster as well as two religiously ideological groups opposing it. It is unclear if they would be as attractive to us in power. For a time we wisely stayed out of the conflict until ISIS began beheading people on YouTube. That got our attention, although it did not change the relative morality of any of the actors in the region. Indeed, our ally, the Saudi monarchy, routinely beheads dissidents, but prudently, not on YouTube. At the same time, the ISIS group is taking territory not only in Syria but in the Sunni regions of Shia Iraq, largely because the central government has not reached out to include the residents of those regions. As a result, we are once more wading into the morass created by our invasion nearly 12 years ago.

The US domestic headlines have been dominated by violent encounters between police and civilians, often with unarmed civilians being killed, many of them African-American. A large part of the population has chosen up sides, pro or anti-police, pro or anti-African-American. Unlike children, they rarely get to play for both sides. Because we did play for both sides as children, we learned the world was not as Manichean as we thought. Adults should be wiser, seeing even more shades of gray than children.

In the Middle East, none of the multiple sides is as good or as bad as we might like to think. In the US neither police nor civilians are as good or as bad as would like to think. To me the bad guys are the ones using guns to shoot at people, whether civilians shooting at police or police shooting at unarmed civilians. It is not the presence or absence of a uniform in an American city or on a foreign battlefield that tells who the good guys are.

So, my wish for 2015 is that overseas we pull back a bit, realizing our limits even to discern the good guys from the bad guys, much less do much about it. Indeed, sometimes we are the only good guys so we should put our efforts elsewhere. And, in the US I hope we will start holding the bad guys accountable, civilian or police. The rest of us, the good guys, police and civilians, deserve that.