Has Susan Rice found her cojones moment? | Turtle Bay

How one simple quote can shape an entire foreign policy:

On Monday, Susan Rice, speaking to hundreds of rabbis at a luncheon hosted by the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), returned to the related theme of Cuban unmentionables, recalling a 1961 speech by Adlai Stevenson defending the Kennedy administration’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and attacking Fidel Castro for his hostility towards the Catholic Church.

“I have already told you about Castro’s crimes against man. But now let me tell you about Castro’s crimes against God,” Rice recalled Stevenson telling the U.N. General Assembly, while an Israeli diplomat and his Irish counterpart listened together attentively. “Castro has circumcised the freedoms of the Catholics of Cuba.”

via Has Susan Rice found her cojones moment? | Turtle Bay.

 

To Know Brazil, Read Stefan Zweig

An important literary figure in the development of a rising world power:

In a recent televised discussion of Mr. Zweig, Alcino Leite Neto, editor of the publishing house Publifolha, compared his importance in Brazil to that in the United States of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker who wrote about American concepts of liberty and equality in “Democracy in America.”

“We had Stefan Zweig,” said Mr. Leite Neto, “who left us this book advocating tolerance, comprehension between people, an indictment in favor of peace, written right during World War II.”

via Stefan Zweig, Viennese-Born Writer, Gets Fresh Look in Brazil – NYTimes.com.

A Rags-to-Riches Career Highlights Latin Resurgence – WSJ.com

Need some good news this weekend?  How about the real rise of the per capita income and fall of the regional poverty rate, according to the UN?

While that income level is below what would be considered middle class in the U.S. or Europe, it is one way to define middle class: individuals earning between about 45% and 70% of per capita income.

A study this year by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean concluded that tens of millions of the region’s inhabitants have risen into the middle class over the past two decades. That’s prompted “a notable expansion of the consumer market,” thanks to growing economies, greater access to education and lower birth rates.

Millions of Latin Americans—construction workers, cooks, secretaries and micro-entrepreneurs—have punched their ticket into the consumer class over the past decade. Some eight million Brazilians took their first plane ride during the past 12 months, according to Sao Paulo’s Data Popular market research firm. In Mexico, the number of credit cards in circulation has quadrupled to 24 million over the past decade. In downtown Lima, middle-class consumers have turned a chaotic 40-block stretch of shops in the Gamarra district into a retail powerhouse, with an estimated $1.5 billion in annual revenues, says Peruvian consultant Juan Infante.

via A Rags-to-Riches Career Highlights Latin Resurgence – WSJ.com.

The Chávez Way – NYTimes.com

Taking stock of Venezuela’s disenfranchised:

There’s no proper count of Venezuelans abroad. What’s clear, though, is that the typical Venezuelan migrant is nothing like the Latin migrant stereotype of the footloose subsistence farmer. Under Chávez, it’s Venezuela’s professional and managerial class that has left home, to flee the forced ideological conformity and stunted economic possibilities his regime has come to represent for them.

via The Chávez Way – NYTimes.com.

Ortega’s Baaaack.

Oops, he did it again in what Ortega’s wife, Rosario Murillo called “the victory of Christianity, socialism, and solidarity.” (Venezuela’s Chavez may also be counting it as a mark in his belt.)   It appears that ideology matters less than results in Latin America’s new reality.

At every turn of the campaign, Mr. Ortega proved to be a shrewd political strategist. He adopted policies aimed at pleasing his base of poor and working-class Nicaraguans, including supplying them with government-donated food. At the same time, he actively reached out to independents and conservative business leaders with his free-market approach to the economy.

Much of his support was due to an alliance with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which brought about $2 billion to the Nicaraguan economy over the past several years.

“He has helped the poor; other presidents didn’t do that,” a law student, Wendy Gonzalez, 19, told The Associated Press after casting her vote in a poor area of the capital, Managua.

via Ortega Poised to Win Third Term as Nicaragua’s President – NYTimes.com.

Argentina’s Turnaround Tango – NYTimes.com

How a formerly economically distraught country can be and example for developing countries today facing debt and other financial challenges:

Argentina may seem like one of the last countries on earth to offer lessons for dealing with economic malaise. Once the eighth-largest economy in the world, it steadily slid through the 20th century, thanks to decades of repressive dictatorships and inconsistent market experiments. This ended ignominiously in 2001, when it defaulted on $100 billion in sovereign debt, plunging over half its 35 million people into poverty.Since then, it has performed an economic U-turn — an achievement largely unnoticed outside Latin America, but one that President Obama and Congress should look to for inspiration.

via Argentina’s Turnaround Tango – NYTimes.com.

Booklist | Manana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans by Jorge G. Castaneda – NPR

Getting inside of Mexico to figure out more about its national culture and what keeps the country from its full potential:

So Mexicans began — from the very beginning, from the Conquest practically, when they weren’t really Mexicans — to find individual solutions to collective problems,” he says.

Take emigration as an example: “With the exception of El Salvador and Ecuador today, Mexico is the country in the world that has the largest share of its population living abroad,” Castaneda says.

In other words, Mexicans prefer to find individual solutions to collective problems by leaving.

But individualism isn’t Mexico’s only problem. Mistrust of the government — which is connected to that individualism — is another factor. So when Mexican politicians do wrong, Castaneda says, the populace largely reacts with hands-off cynicism.

“Mexico’s tremendous aversion to conflict and confrontation and competition,” he says, “almost obliges Mexican society not to confront its politicians, not to confront its elites, not to confront its leaders, but simply put up with it.”

He says institutional change has helped

via Modernizing Mexico For A Better ‘Manana’ : NPR.

RIP – R. Richard Rubottom- Helped Shape Cuban Policy

An obit on a key figure in Cuba policy, who also was an educator at SMU, but played an important role on a number of Latin American issues:

With the rise of Mr. Castro, Mr. Rubottom represented the State Department in meetings with military and intelligence officials on whether, how and when to try to eliminate him both before and after he seized power in January 1959.

via R. Richard Rubottom, 98, Is Dead – Helped Shape Cuban Policy – NYTimes.com.

“The battle for Rio de Janeiro” – Global Post

Things are heating up as the Brazilian government works to retake the slums of Rio in preparation for the World Cup and Olympic Games.  Let’s hope that Brazilian policy and political leaders are familiar with the lessons of COIN–as well as “The Wire” lest these efforts fail to ‘take and hold’ the terrain and local support.

Most estimates in the Brazilian press place the number of armed gang members hiding out in Complexo do Alemao in the low hundreds, suggesting many have escaped to other slums.

The state’s public security director, Jose Mariano Beltrame, told reporters police will continue the push into two other huge slums, Rocinha and Vidigal, but he declined to say when.

via Brazil | Rio de Janeiro | Drug War.

Also, for a more personal view of the ‘crisis’ from the inside–what else, Twitter updates from Rene Silva, a 17 year old favela resident–as reported on the Beeb.

A Future for Unasur?

What are the prospects for a new political/security/economic/social group for Latin America sans the US?  Or, in other words, the “political complement which is missing with Mercosur“:

“It’s really only been, so far, a series of summits and declarations driven by personalities,” Sabatini said in a phone interview from New York on Nov. 24. “Clearly, Unasur has aspirations to become a regional grouping free of the United States that does what the OAS purports to do, but does it better. It has to have some sort of life between summits.”

via Unasur Pledges to Isolate Governments From Coups, Fight Drug Trafficking – Bloomberg.