Harry Targ
I have called on all the people of the hemisphere to join in
a new Alliance for Progress - Alianza para Progreso - a vast cooperative
effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic
needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools -
techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela….
To achieve this goal political freedom must accompany
material progress. Our Alliance for Progress is an alliance of free
governments-and it must work to eliminate tyranny from a hemisphere in which it
has no rightful place. Therefore let us express our special friendship to the
people of Cuba and the Dominican Republic-and the hope they will soon rejoin
the society of free men, uniting with us in our common effort (Address by President Kennedy at
a White House reception for Latin American diplomats and members of Congress,
March 13, 1961).
Those who make peaceful revolution
impossible will make violent revolution inevitable (Address by President Kennedy to
diplomats one year after his Alliance for Progress speech. March 13, 1962).
The
Alliance for Progress as a “Non-Communist” Path to Development
The Kennedy Administration initiated a policy of foreign
assistance in Latin America to complement the United States’ historic use of
military force in the region. The President’s economic program was announced in
the aftermath of long-standing complaints from Latin American dictators and
some elected leaders that the United States had supported European recovery,
the celebrated Marshall Plan of the 1940s, but ignored the Western Hemisphere.
Most importantly, the Kennedy Administration and anti-Communist friends in the
Hemisphere became increasingly concerned about the enthusiasm the Cuban
revolution was generating in the region.
In the midst of what was presented to the public as the
“threat of Communism” in Latin America, Kennedy presented his “Alliance for
Progress” aid package to diplomats and Congressmen on March 3, 1961 (about one
month before JFK authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion).
The Alliance, the President promised, would provide
public and private assistance equivalent to $20 billion to Latin American
countries over a ten-year period. The plan projected annual growth rates in
Latin America of 2.5 percent and would lead to the alleviation of malnutrition,
poor housing and health, single-crop economies, and iniquitous landholding
patterns (all campaigns underway in revolutionary Cuba).
Loans were contingent upon the recipient governments,
and their political and economic elites, carrying out basic land reform, establishing
progressive taxation, creating social welfare programs, and expanding
citizenship and opportunities for political participation.
However, the effect of the Alliance, even before
Kennedy’s death, was negative. Problems of poverty, declining growth rates,
inflation, lower prices for export commodities, and the maintenance of
autocratic and corrupt governments persisted. The reality of the Alliance and
most other aid programs was that they were predicated on stabilizing those
corrupt ruling classes that had been the source of underdevelopment in the
first place.
The connections between the Alliance program and the
interests of United States capital were clear. For example, a section of the
Foreign Assistance Act of 1962 authorized the president to cut off aid to any
nation which nationalized or placed “excessive” taxes on U.S. corporations or which
terminated contacts with U.S. firms. The act also emphasized monetary stability
and the kinds of austerity programs common to U.S. and International Monetary
Fund aid, requiring nations receiving aid to reduce public services and to maintain
low wage rates to entice foreign investment. Further, Alliance funds were often
to be used to serve the interests of foreign capital; for example building
roads, harbors, and transportation facilities to speed up the movement of
locally produced but foreign-owned goods to international markets.
Finally, the symbolism of the Alliance proclamation
by President Kennedy was designed to promote the idea that U.S. resources, in
collaboration with reformism in Latin America, would create societies that met
the needs of the people and encouraged their political participation. The
Alliance was presented as a response to Fidel Castro, a “non-Communist manifesto”
for development.
The record of poverty and military rule throughout
the Hemisphere suggested that there was no correspondence between symbol and
reality. Kennedy, in a moment of unusual frankness, was reported to have said
that the United States preferred liberal regimes in Latin America, but if they
could not be maintained, it would much prefer a right-wing dictatorship to a
leftist regime. After Kennedy’s death, Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of
State for Inter-American Affairs, in the Johnson Administration, told reporters
that U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere was not about economic development
or democratization but fighting Communism and protecting U.S. economic
interests.
In reality, the frankness about the motivations
behind U.S. policy expressed by Kennedy after the Alliance speech and Thomas
Mann after Kennedy’s death clearly showed that the bottom line in terms of U.S.
policy remained support for international capital. The Castros of this world,
the Kennedy Administration believed (as has every administration since), had to
be crushed at all costs. What remained significant over the next sixty years
was that the Cuban revolution could not be defeated.
As the next essay in this series suggests, the
Kennedy Administration, having failed to overthrow Cuban socialism at the Bay
of Pigs, nor diminish its luster in the region through the economic bribery of
the Alliance for Progress program, was willing to go to the brink of nuclear
war, the Cuban Missile crisis, to combat socialism in the Western Hemisphere.
This
essay is the second of three articles that address U.S./Cuban relations that
culminated in a crisis over Cuba that almost led to nuclear war. These essays
are adapted from my book, Strategy of an Empire in Decline:
Cold War II, 1986.
