By James Moore
“Americans are benevolently ignorant of the rest of the world.” (George Bernard Shaw)
Just a few years after Ronald Reagan had become President, an organization of U.S. Hispanic political leaders began pondering a normalization of relations with Cuba. Hard to know where their optimism came from given Reagan’s politics, but they put together a delegation to approach Fidel Castro and gauge his sentiments toward trade and travel with America. Inexplicably, I got the assignment from a Houston editor to join the group and file reports for the evening news. Fidel had no reason to think the new American President had a cooperative sentiment towards the politics and economy and people of his homeland. Since the Cuban leader had landed on the island with revolutionary Che Guevara in 1959, the CIA had tried everything from poison pens to invasions to have him killed.
My cameraman and I stayed in the Rivera Hotel next to the seawall in Havana. The interior was tired and faded from the days of abundance when wealthy Americans and mobsters came down to gamble and drink and fornicate for the weekend. They owned the casinos, and the government, and propped up the U.S.-backed dictator flunky Fulgencio Batista, who got a big share of the skim on everything while keeping his people oppressed and making millions for the Mafia. Before he was deposed by Castro, Batista had put most of the country’s sugar industry into U.S. corporate hands and 70 percent of the island’s arable lands were owned by foreign interests. Oblivious, he was building a petri dish culture to grow a revolution.
Every morning, were were met in the lobby by our “minder,” a government driver who took us to scheduled meetings with Cuban bureaucrats and on tours of cigar factories and sugar plantations. I recall his name as Alberto, middle-aged, slight of build with the pinch-faced look of a man who had been waiting too long for something good to happen in his life. His English was North American perfect and nuanced to the point where an undercurrent of resentment for U.S. citizens and their privileges slipped into his conversation. Nonetheless, he managed to be charming and accommodating and unafraid to ask questions.
“We don’t understand you Americans down here,” he said. “We only meet good people from up there but you have a government that is not good.”
“We somehow know that,” I said. “And still manage to let it happen.”
“We Cubans, though, don’t hate the American people, we just hate your government. I don’t know how nice people have bad government.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re not the only ones, Alberto.”
“Oh no, I agree with that.” He laughed. “But sometimes it seems like everything that happens in the States is a decision to hurt us.”
“Nah, I can’t agree with that.”
“Oh, what about this NutraSweet stuff?” He turned his head to look at me in the back seat. “It’s destroying our sugar market around the world.”
“The artificial sweetener?”
“Yes, sugar prices are falling. Our plantation workers are suffering. This cannot last.”
“I hope it doesn’t,” I said.
“Well, don’t worry too much. We know how to survive here in Cuba.”
I got a few minutes with Fidel on that trip, but he did not offer much insight into his thinking regarding Reagan, though everyone knew he was realistic and saw no chance for diplomatic or economic relations. His view was that most Americans neither cared about, nor understood, the little island 90 miles south of Florida, and most of that awareness came from the missile crisis standoff with the USSR during the Kennedy Administration. The tempered antipathy of Cubans felt to me like an attitude that kept our foreign relations from any kind of measurable success. How do you trust good people with imperialist governments and capitalist greed; that seemed to be their central question.
When the documentary from my first book premiered, I was invited to speak at a film festival in Bergen, Norway. I was stunned to find every seat occupied in a large auditorium but I was not in the least surprised by the curiosity expressed during the Q and A session following the film’s conclusion. The opening line of the documentary asked a question regarding the election of George W. Bush: “How did this happen?” The moderator of the session pointed to a woman standing at a microphone that had been situated in the aisles between the seats.
“I’m not sure your film really answers its most important question,” she said. “Can you explain how Bush got elected with a bit more detail?”
“I can try,” I said. “I’ve sure spent a lot of time wondering about it, and I still am. But our democracy is as imperfect as all the others in the world, I think. It makes mistakes.”
“Don’t you think the rest of the world expects more from Americans?” Her voice had risen slightly and the coat she had been holding, folded over her forearms, fell to the floor, ignored. “U.S. citizens have already made enough mistakes with all your military misadventures. We all just want to know what’s going on in your country.”
“I understand,” I said. “But I don’t think I can give you any kind of satisfying answer. The Supreme Court gave the election to Bush, and it should not have. I choose to believe the voters will correct the mistake in the next election.”
“That’s just not good enough,” she said, and bent over to pick her coat up off the floor. “I’m not sure how much longer we can say we love the American people when they keep doing foolish things like this past election.”
My prediction Bush’s election would be corrected in 2004, misguided as it had been, prompted the festival’s directors to invite me back to attempt explaining the outcome I had suggested was not possible. I took the trip, enjoyed Bergen and its Viking history and seafood market, and dreaded my session at the festival. No need, of course, the audience was more sad and sympathetic than angry because they mostly had their trust shattered in our citizenry and our republic. Our voters were viewed as victims of their own ignorance.
I had traveled extensively in Canada, Europe, the Caribbean and Mexico by the time I got an assignment in the late 80s to report on a U.S. military exercise off the coast of Honduras. The Reagan Administration was putting on a muscular demonstration for Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolutionaries, and, if any locale on the planet were to hold a resentment toward the U.S., it was Central America; especially the Hondurans. Our government was central to condemning most of the population to lives as peasants serving multi-national corporate fruit growers. Instead, what I consistently encountered, was a kindness and understanding that hardly seemed justified.
The most telling moment came on a mountain road outside of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. The driver we had hired was taking us to speak with a group of dissidents who backed the Sandinistas and wanted the U.S. to stop supporting the rebel Contras. Our driver and translator was explaining his country’s politics when we came around a bend and discovered six men with AK-47s standing in the middle of the road. I did not think it was good moment to be a journalist. They raised a rope to make certain we knew to stop, and came up to the driver’s side window to ask questions. The conversation, calm, initially, became energetic and animated, and I grew worried. Finally, the driver turned around and asked for the bag of tacos he had purchased for our lunch.
“They’re hungry,” he said. “I negotiated a deal. I told them we had tacos they could have if they let us pass, and that we had no money. They don’t believe the money part but they are hungry enough to settle for our dozen tacos.”
“Here, here,” I said, and quickly handed the bag forward. The gunmen, wearing plain, unmarked khaki pants and shirts, passed the bag around, smiling and laughing as we drove away.
“Was that a ‘Your-tacos-or-your-life’ situation?” I asked.
“Not quite,” he said. “But we must find a different route back to the city this afternoon. I don’t like to take chances.”
“Do they like Americans?”
“Not really. But they don’t want them as enemies. They just want you all to go away and mind your own business.”
“Yeah, we act like everything is our business, I suppose.”
America’s international “benefit-of-a-doubt” card has expired. We have turned our country over to a man who has sundered the parts of our reputation that were good and decent and belonged to the people. Welcome mats are being rolled up around the world and U.S. citizens need to exercise great care when they travel outside their own country. The governments of former allies are issuing travel warnings regarding the U.S., and being an American overseas might place you in untenable situations that could lead to great risks.
And it’s possible not even a bag of delicious tacos will save the day.
This article was originally published on Texas to the world.
James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.
He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).
His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.
Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”
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My uncle knew Fidel Castro. It was a way to get Cuban cigars into the US as a diplomatic package. He was proud of the original cigar box for the refills.
He also got to talk to Che Guavara for two hours and found him very intelligent and aware of people’s plight.
The theorists, and the movers and shakers of capitalism, (the system based on competition and the weakest to the wall) are yet to realise that their precious system runs on, depends on, goodwill.
If the US was wasting goodwill back in Reagan’s day, that well must be just about dry by now.
And to compound the problem, they are destroying goodwill at home.
Here we are, clutching our pearls and wailing over Trump’s latest crime and those yet to come, but Joti Brar, speaking a few days ago at a forum on the Venezuela kidnapping, made the very good point that we will not stop imperialism abroad unless we first stop it at home.
“We?”
Yes, that’s us.
We are a cog in the killing machine of the Empire.
We need to consider the following.
Aimé Césaire, the Martinician playwright and politician, in “Discourse on Colonialism” writes that the savage tools of imperialism and colonialism eventually migrate back to the home country. It is known as imperial boomerang.
Césaire writes: And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind— it will pass!”
And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
Ian, I knew a bloke in America who worked in customs.
Let’s say he/they seized 500 Cuban cigars. They’d report 500 cigars seized and 500 cigars would go into the bin.
But…
They weren’t the seized cigars. No, no no. They’d buy 500 cheap cigars and throw them in the bin.
The 500 Cuban cigars were smoked or sold to mates.
No shade on GBS, but USAnian ignorance towards the rest of the world was never benevolent. It was born of arrogance and rooted in cruelty.
It’s only Monday here, but now I want tacos …
As an outsider looking in, the problem with US presidential elections seems threefold.
The lack of separation of powers in the US system is a deep flaw, as in the system of political appointments of judges.
Another problem is the role of money in determining the government. It can’t be called a democracy if only the rich, or those backed by vast amounts of money can get elected.
The other problem is that it is a two-party system. When both parties have given bad governance what is the populace to do? During the last election I was stunned to find out the Democrats spent huge amounts of money blocking Greens candidature.
Australia is already well down that path. Both the Coalition and Labor have governed for corporations and not the people for decades, and in particular the past 13 years have been basically lost in terms of governance. Labor attacks the Greens every bit as vociferously as does the Coalition.
Yes. Politics in both countries is a giant rook.
Good article, thanks James.
All despots rely on and encourage voters to abdicate their responsibilities. They use every piece of guile in the playbook.
Trouble is, as despots succeed, others (politicians, corporations and institutions) trapped by them become paranoid about speaking out, until the m.o. metastasizes to a contagion in the political sphere.
Ultimately a revolution takes place, but cleaning up the mess may never really be achieved, as long as self-righteousness, supremacist ambition and vengeance surrounds the soul.
“Yeah, we act like everything is our business, I suppose.”
I think this is one very significant reason I find Americans so bloody difficult to get along with.
My wife, Chinese, was trained to be an elite sportsperson by the CCP in its nationwide program to develop a body of people who would be competitive at the Olympics. Along the way, she was also educated to Masters level in her chosen field of education, and spent the next 21 years as a university-employed academic and administrator. During the last third of that term of employment, she was offered an overseas sabbatical, and duly went through the hoops with the American embassy in Beijing to spend the twelve months in that country.
In her defence, she’s a squeaky-clean individual; nothing to suggest she’s ever been involved in anything dubious, not even a member of the CCP. She was part of the Tiananmen protest, but then, so were thousands of others.
Anyway, at the embassy, waiting in line, getting to the counter, encountering the American dude on the other side of the grill, and being flatly rejected without explanation and a curt ‘come back tomorrow’ … she was mightily unimpressed by this little show of American desk-jockey mightier than thou behaviour.
She switched, applied instead for Australia, and in due course spent an enjoyable and profitable 12 months in Brisbane, followed 6 years later by her permanent relocation.
Quite a few of her alumni moved to the states, all of them setting themselves up as sports coaches and successfully so. Whenever she mentions so & so has just moved to the USA, I invariably say ‘sorry to hear that.’