Left to right: Obama's pendular swing through Latin America.
President Barack Obama departed today from his historic state visit to Cuba and will land around midnight in Argentina. This pendular motion from visiting a country ruled by a left-wing government, to one now ruled by a right-wing government, has to do with U.S. politics. The visit to Argentina seeks to neutralize any "left-wing" aspersions Obama's critics have cast against him for his Cuban visit.
To be sure, the president's visits to both countries are mainly of symbolic significance. For Cuba this visit, while mostly a gesture with no concrete announcements on disputes such as the 54-year blockade or the return of Guantánamo, was nevertheless meaningful in that it broke the proverbial ice. This was no easy undertaking, given the opposition from certain quarters within the CIA and the Miami Cuban exile community, which for decades monopolized official Washington policy toward Cuba. Obama's visit breaks that barrier and opens up a range of possibilities for the island.
For the Cuban people, moreover, the fact that the first President of the United States to visit the island in 88 years is black and has an elegant, beautiful black wife makes the thaw in relations all the more endearing. The Obama family has a special charisma among the Cuban people. For President Obama it's important to dispel notions that the U.S. is Cuba's enemy as this has been the principal obstacle the U.S. has had in winning the ideological dispute. And time was of the essence, because it would have been very different with Trump or Clinton.
Obama's visit to Argentina, however, lacks either the symbolism or the potential for concrete announcements. This is an administration which, paradoxically, has been less supportive than George W. Bush's was on Argentina's principal bilateral dispute with the U.S.: vulture funds and their demands for astronomical payouts on old defaulted bonds.
The Obama administration voted against the Argentine proposal at the UN General Assembly for an international debt/bondholder dispute resolution mechanism - a proposal approved last year by a vast majority of countries at the General Assembly. Nor did the Obama administration intervene in the judicial dispute with vulture funds when it could have done so, and despite the fact that those who control vulture funds are massive contributors to the Republican Party.
Before embarking in his Latin American tour, Obama made statements about the region designed to placate the right. Referring to Argentina, he mentioned that with former President Cristina Kirchner "I had a warm relationship; but her policies were anti-American." He provided no specifics, nor did he mention the vulture funds. He spoke as if the bad image that the U.S. has in Latin America was the work of a Marxist or populist campaign, rather than their own history of interventionist policies in the political realm and predatory actions in the economic.
His visit to Argentina is in that spirit. The very timing of his arrival, just three months after President Mauricio Macri took office - a right-winger who's a friend of Donald Trump (and not of Obama or Hillary Clinton) - further underscores that point.
It should also be noted that while the U.S. ostracized Cuba until only recently, Cuba has had normal and fraternal relations with all its Latin American neighbors - particularly over the last decade. This did not occur by happenstance; it was the result of efforts by regional leaders such as Brazil's Lula da Silva, Argentina's Néstor Kirchner, and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. Their advocacy for the incorporation of Cuba into the regional community of nations led to a break in Cuba's isolation, and arguably paved the way for Obama's policy of rapprochement today.
The problem is that these efforts to promote U.S.-Cuban reconciliation were carried out without asking permission from the State Department. However prescient these efforts may seem today, for Washington they are an example of "anti-American" policy of the kind Macri would never make the "mistake" of pursuing.
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