Castro’s Demise Won’t Erase Troubled U.S. Legacy: Enrique Krauze

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Nicaragua’s Ruben Dario, the greatest Latin-American poet of the time, wrote “Ode to Roosevelt” in the early 1900s, warning the American president that “a thousand cubs have issued from the Spanish lion” and labeling U.S. domination as a matter of “iron claws.”

Dario’s prophecy was fulfilled in 1959. The leader of the Cuban Revolution against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista could accurately be described as one of the “cubs” of the “Spanish Lion.” Fidel Castro’s father, Angel, was a veteran (on the Spanish side) of the 1898 war. After the defeat of Spain, he had settled on the island and became a rich and prominent member of the rural upper-middle class. The conversion of Cuba, for all practical purposes, into a U.S. protectorate bred resentment, fueled by the U.S. Marines’ repeated interference in the country’s politics. (It’s no accident that the most anti-American area of Mexico is Veracruz, which was invaded by the Marines in 1914.)

As early as 1922, the Mexican historian Daniel Cosio Villegas predicted that “hatred for the Americans will become the religion of Cubans.” In 1947, the same distinguished liberal intellectual wrote that there is in Latin America “a dense layer of distrust and rancor toward the United States.” He predicted that one day “no more than four or five agitators in the principal countries of Latin America” would “launch a campaign of defamation and hatred toward the United States,” and the continent would “seethe with unrest and be ready for anything.”

The friendship and accord between Che Guevara and Castro weren’t only tactical and military but ideological. Che came from a tradition of cultural anti-Americanism prevalent in the Southern Cone (Argentina and Uruguay). This was an area with very little direct contact with the U.S., but which, as a result of an economic upsurge in the years before 1929, saw America as a competitor and itself as a cultural alternative to “the American way of life.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-30/castro-s-demise-won-t-erase-troubled-u-s-legacy-enrique-krauze.html