The great debate on how much – or how little — Barack Obama would change our disastrous U.S. foreign policy usually focuses on the Middle East. That makes sense. Nowhere has the price of the Bush national security strategy been higher, as the violent deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers and 93,000 Iraqis attest.
In March 1998, the Baltimore Orioles flew to Cuba to play its national team in Havana. In a well-pitched game the O’s won 3-2, in the 13th inning. Two months later, the Cubans routed the birds in Baltimore. During the games, talent agents from various teams from both leagues took detailed notes about the Cuban players. Indeed, such careful studying, if practiced by U.S. diplomats in Havana, might actually teach Washington policymakers something about the nature of Cuba. But given the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, this may happen when fish learn to sing opera.
When sudden food price increases started to make headlines last summer, an estimated 852 million people were already living with crippling hunger, which the United Nations defines as continuously getting too little food to maintain a healthy and minimally active life. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates another 50 million people were added to the count in 2007. For people living with hunger, a long-term solution won’t come quickly enough. Many of them will need emergency assistance. Clearly, the UN and donor nations need to plan and invest more strategically to ensure a more food-secure future.
Speaking at a February campaign rally, Sen. Barack Obama decried “leaders [who] change their positions on trade with the politics of the moment.” He argued, “We need a president who will listen to Main Street – not just Wall Street; a president who will stand with workers, not just when it’s easy, but when it’s hard.”
When peasant farmers in Cacahuatepec set out to work in their fields in January 2003 they found heavy equipment bulldozing down the corn, fruit trees, and fences they depend on for survival. The indigenous Nahuatl communities of this region in the mountains above Acapulco demanded an explanation from Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission and for months received no answers.
On April 8, President Felipe Calderon dropped a political bomb on the Mexican political scene. The Senate received an executive initiative that would fundamentally change the structure and operations of the oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). Key operations of the state-owned enterprise would pass into private hands.
In their contributions to the Foreign Policy In Focus strategic dialogue on Cuba, Samuel Farber discusses the problematic economic reforms and nonexistent political reforms in Life After Fidel while Saul Landau looks at the fragile achievements of the Cuban revolution and the hostile U.S. policy toward the island in Cuba: The Struggle Continues. Here, they respond to each other.
Fidel Castro’s official resignation as head of the Cuban state, although expected, was a turning point that has raised major questions concerning Cuba’s future. His younger brother Raúl, who now officially assumed the highest position in the country, had already “temporarily” replaced the commander in chief on July 31, 2006 after Fidel Castro stepped aside due to a serious illness, the nature of which was declared a state secret.
[Note: This essay was drawn from FPIF analyst Mark Engler’s new book, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy, published by Nation Books.]
R. Victoria Arana was born in Lima, Peru. She is a graduate of Vassar College, Princeton University, and the George Washington University – where, respectively, she studied Romance languages and literatures, Middle Eastern culture and literature, and English literature and literary criticism. Today, she teaches in the English department at Howard University. Her most recent publication is World Poetry from 1900 to the Present (NY: Facts on File, 2007). Here she talks with FPIF’s E. Ethelbert Miller about new black literature in Britain and its take on empire.