The Caribbean disease

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington

6ow long', the senator from the H loState of Delaware asked his col- leagues, 'are we to listen to the cries of outraged humanity that every southern breeze wafts across the straits that separate Cuba from Florida?' The senator's name was George Groy and the year of his utter- ance was 1895.

That was 22 years before the Bolesheviks seized power in St Petersburg. Then it wasn't Russian penetration but Spanish which had the ruling circles in the United States saying strong, wild things. Congres- sional Americans and presidental Americans are congenitally disposed toward seeing the worst in the Caribbean and Central America. Several weeks ago President Reagan was on the television with new aerial reconnaissance photographs of the new airport being built in Grenada in which he which he was able to see an ominous extension of the power of Cuban and Russian military aviation. The day after the broadcast it was learned that a) any tourist who cares to may photograph any and all parts of the airport at ground level, b) much of the work on the runways had been done by several American con- struction firms and c) the new photograph was the one the Pentagon had been using for a year or more to document communist encroachment in this American sea.

Be the foreign power monarchist or marxist, as soon as it intrudes into Central America or the Caribbean, the governing elites in the United States will have a fit. American power will be mobilised, under the banners of the most strident democratic idealism, to expel it. Thus President Reagan's epiphany the other night in front of an unusual joint session of Congress, asking for permission to marshal that Power once more, is in keeping with a tradi- tion which goes back to the late 1880s. That is our lake down there, or so five genera- tions of American nationalist politicians have been brought up to believe.

Mr Reagan was saying no more than many another American politician has for the last century when he told those of his fellow citizens who cared to listen that 'Cen- tral America's problems do directly affect the security and well being of our people ... El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts. Nicaragua is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego and Tucson as those cities are to Washington.' By the same token London is closer to New York City than New York City is to Anchorage, Alaska, which goes to show you, but not Mr Reagan, that the United States is a very large nation indeed. The best non-hysterical estimate of what has been happening in the Caribbean basin, as we now call it, these past few months is nothing much. The killings, murders, op- pressions and repressions by one side or another in one little nation or another have been going on in a way that appears almost routine. Nevertheless, starting a few weeks ago, the papers began to cloud up with stories of the impending defeat of the forces of freedom and democracy, whoever they may be. At the State Department and the Pentagon where they are never happier than when they can look a crisis, real or imagin- ed, grimly in the face, visages took on ex- pressions firm, determined and heroic.

The best one can say is that Caribbean basin crises return to Washington as malaria returns to those who suffer from it. For months you're in remission and then wham, for no known reason, your temperature shoots up to 106 degrees and you start saying crazy things.

Given our past performances in those climes, what is surprising is not Mr Reagan's fixations on Red influence in minuscule places like Grenada, but his moderation. Seventeen years ago, on the mere suspicion that the communists had crawled out of the surf and up the beaches of Santo Domingo, President Johnson sent in the Marines. In contrast President Reagan is a raging moderate. He wants to use aid, military coaching, not-so-secretly- paid counter-revolutionary stumble bums and sabotage by the CIA, an instrument of policy which is about as effective in the field as the rum-swilling, anti-communist, Latin American braggarts who've been on the American payroll since the early days of Fidel .Castro's power.

No matter. Loud, noisy and bellicose failure in these places may be the best policy. By making highly visible efforts to uproot and toss out the influence of all foreign powers in the general area, a Presi-

dent can placate the people schooled in the tradition that Central America and the Caribbean are ours. At the same time, by taking the course he has chosen, Mr Reagan can be reasonably sure that his policy is too weak and too unfocused to succeed.

That also is all to the best. Previous American presidents — Taft, Wilson, Coolidge, Johnson — learned that nothing is easier to conquer than a Central American banana republic nor harder to govern. These are places with a thousand ways in and not one way out.

The people who oppose Mr Reagan's ap- proach might keep that lesson in mind. Senator Christopher Dodd, in giving the Democratic rebuttal to the President's speech, was anything but reassuring to a student of American history down there when he told the same national television audience: 'Yes, we are fully prepared to be involved in Central America ... we must hear the cry for bread, schools, work and opportunity that comes from campesinos everywhere in this hemisphere. We must make violent revolution preventable by making peaceful revolution possible.' How on earth are we going to do that? We are having rather a bit of trouble adjusting our hearing aids to pick up the cries for bread, schools and work in the United States.

The liberals insist on saying that, with or without communism, the nations in the basin would still be awash with insurrec- tion. This underplaying of communist in- fluences, direct and indirect, is what so often gets American liberals into political trouble. The French Revolution was the in- spirational model for South and Central America throwing off the rule of Spain and Portugal, in a manner not too different. Marxism of one kind or another obviously dominates revolutionary imaginations in the latitudes to the south of the United States. To deny it is to set one's self up for a continuing series of unhappy surprises.

American conservatives and liberals unite on the proposition that, with American help, any country can be turned into a blossoming, fruit-laden democracy. It's a race memory of the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s which indisputably did help bring the good times back to western Europe.

But western Europe was going to to make a comeback with or without us. Without us it might have taken longer, but the lesson of four decades of American aid, well ad- ministered or not, is that the determining factor is national character, political struc- ture, culture, things over which we have no control. Japan, South Korea, Singapore owe their successes primarily to themselves.

Given our domestic political screamers, given the world's fright that we might turn isolationist one night and go home, we must continue to dibble and dabble in Central America. But let these games be played on a minimalist scale: minimal proclamations, minimal expectations, minimal acts of militarism and let us hope, with the passage of time, that the people in El Salvador and thereabouts will work out on their own how to get their opera sung.