Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (121 page)

The problem immediately arose in an acute form in Latin America. Under the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 the United States had policed the hemisphere, in theory to preserve the independence of its nations from European covetousness, in reality to protect America’s own interests. This often involved military intervention, especially in Central America and the Caribbean. The Monroe Doctrine was
based on the reasoning that the Caribbean was America’s ‘inland sea’ and part of the US economic structure. In Cuba, which America had liberated from Spain, the US right of intervention was actually written into the Cuban constitution, through the so-called ‘Piatt Amendment’. In the inter-war period, under the impact of Wilsonian doctrines of self-determination, the system foundered. In the 1928 Clark Memorandum, the State Department itself argued that Monroe did not justify US intervention since ‘it states a case of United States vs. Europe, not the United States vs. Latin America’.
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Roosevelt accepted this logic, scrapped the Platt Amendment in 1934 and introduced instead a ‘Good Neighbour’ policy, which in theory treated the Latin American states as equals. This might in time have worked very well, with the larger nations forming the same kind of relationship with their giant patron as Canada.

The most likely candidate for this role was Argentina, whose economy in the inter-war period was developing on the lines of Canada’s and Australia’s. Like Canada it had boomed from 1900 to 1914, experienced slower growth in the 1920s, a sharp setback from 1929 to 1933, but thereafter a long period of growth at an average of 2–3 per cent a year, with steady progress in the manufacturing, mining, oil, public utilities and electrical sectors: achieving, in fact, economic take-off – the first Latin American country to do so.
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It had a market economy, minimum government, a growing middle class, a free press and the rule of law. During the Second World War it enjoyed a prosperity unknown in the southern hemisphere outside Australia, with wages rising to West European levels. It accumulated what was then the princely reserves of $1,500 million in dollar and sterling balances – more than Britain, Argentina’s chief economic partner, had been able to invest there in over seventy years.
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If the money had been used to create steel, petroleum and other import-substitution industries, the likelihood is that Argentina would have achieved dynamic, self-sustaining economic growth during the 1950s, and the whole history of Latin America would have been different.

Instead, Argentina fell victim to both the twin evils which poison Latin America: militarism and politics. In the nineteenth century the military
coup
had become a standard means to change government. This disastrous practice continued after the arrival of universal suffrage. In the years 1920–66, for instance, there were eighty successful military
coups
in eighteen Latin-American countries, Ecuador and Bolivia leading with nine each, Paraguay and Argentina following with seven each.
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The key one in Argentina came in 1943. The junta appointed to the Labour Ministry a certain Colonel Juan Perón, the son of a poor farmer who had done well in the army; a
handsome ski and fencing champion, flashy in mind and body, student of sociology, a pseudo-intellectual of the type that was to become very common in the post-war era. The military had hitherto stamped on unions. Perón discovered that, by patronizing labour, he could build himself a mass-following. As Labour Minister, he took over the unions. Hitherto, union leaders had been bribed personally. Perón bribed the entire labour movement.
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Perón’s career illustrated the essential identity of the Marxist and the fascist will to power, for at times he borrowed from Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Stalin. He had great personal charm; a superb speaking voice; a gift for ideological verbiage. He spoke of his labour followers as ‘the shirtless ones’ (they were in fact well paid). He called his philosophy
Justicialismo
, the first of the bogus ‘isms’ of what was to become the Third World. Perón could claim to be the prototype not merely of a new kind of Latin-American dictator but of all the post-colonial charismatics of Africa and Asia. He was the link between the old-style mountebank dictator and the new Bandung model. He showed how to manipulate head-counting democracy. He had no substance. When he quarrelled with his military colleagues in 1945, all he could think of was to fall on his knees and beg for mercy. It was his mistress Eva Duarte, a militant feminist, who roused the workers and got him released. By marrying her he squared the church. Then he swept on to a handsome victory (24 February 1945) in one of the few free elections in Argentina’s history.
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As President, Perón gave a classic demonstration, in the name of socialism and nationalism, of how to wreck an economy. He nationalized the Central Bank, railways, telecommunications, gas, electricity, fishing, air-transport, steel and insurance. He set up a state marketing agency for exports. He created Big Government and a welfare state in one bound: spending on public services, as percentage of
GNP
, rose from 19.5 to 29.5 per cent in five years.
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He had no system of priorities. He told the people they would get everything at once. In theory they did. The workers were given thirteen months’ pay for a year’s work; holidays with pay; social benefits at a Scandinavian level. He would track down a highly successful firm which spent lavishly on its workers and force all firms to copy its practices, regardless of their resources. At the same time he carried out a frontal assault on the agricultural sector, Argentina’s main source of internal capital. By 1951 he had exhausted the reserves and decapitalized the country, wrecked the balance of payments and built wage-inflation into the system. Next year drought struck the land and brought the crisis into the open. Seeing his support vanish, Perón turned from economic demagoguery to
political tyranny. He destroyed the Supreme Court. He took over the radio station and
La Prensa
, the greatest newspaper in Latin America. He debauched the universities and fiddled with the constitution. Above all, he created public ‘enemies’: Britain, America, all foreigners, the Jockey Club, which his gangs burnt down in 1953, destroying its library and art collection. Next year he turned on Catholicism, and in 1955 his labour mobs destroyed Argentina’s two finest churches, San Francisco and Santo Domingo, and many others.

That was the last straw. The army turned him out. He fled on a Paraguayan gunboat. But his successors could never get back to the minimum government which had allowed Argentina to become wealthy. Too many vested interests had been created: a huge, parasitical state, over-powerful unions, a vast army of public employees. It is one of the dismal lessons of the twentieth century that, once a state is allowed to expand, it is almost impossible to contract it. Perón’s legacy proved more durable than his verbiage. But he himself proved durable enough. In 1968 the head of the military, General Alejandro Lanusse, swore: if that man … should set foot in this land again, one of us, he or I, will leave it feet first, because I shall not let my sons suffer what I have.’ Five years later, as President, he organized the elections which swept Perón back into power, aged seventy-nine: a case, as Dr Johnson said of second marriage, of ‘the triumph of hope over experience’.
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By this point the whole course of Argentina’s history had been changed. It had forfeited its chance of becoming an advanced economy and had been permanently downgraded to the status of a second-rate Latin-American republic, condemned to industrial backwardness, political instability and military tyranny. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the public life of Argentina became increasingly savage, and in 1982 it even embarked on a reckless military adventure against Britain’s Falkland Isles, which ended in humiliating defeat.

The Perónist revolution was a wider disaster for Latin America as a whole, and for the USA also. The Canadian analogy receded. In frustration and despair, demagoguery flourished; and demagogues, as Perón himself had done, took the easy way out and blamed America. Moreover, Perón himself remained a potent exemplar. He had ‘stood up to the
Yanquis’;
he had made his country truly independent for the first time. His economic failure was forgotten; his political success was remembered and imitated.

Perón’s shadow fell over Cuba. It, like Argentina before Perón, was one of the richest Latin-American countries. But its economic structure was very different. It was really part of the US economy. When it became independent in 1898 it should, in logic, have become a US state, like Texas or New Mexico, or a colony, like Puerto Rico,
to be later upgraded. In 1924 US investment in Cuba was already $1.2 billion. Cuba got 66 per cent of its imports from the US and sent it 83 per cent of its exports, chiefly sugar. In 1934 the Reciprocal Trade Agreement forbade Cuba to impose tariffs or quotas on a wide range of US imports; the quid pro quo, the Jones-Costigan Act, guaranteed the USA would take the Cuban sugar crop at generous prices. The arrangement was termed by Earl Babst, head of the American Sugar Refining Company, ‘a step in the direction of a sound colonial policy’.
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After 1945 the dominance of the USA in the Cuban economy slowly declined. But even in the 1950s the US Ambassador in Havana, as one of them testified, was ‘the second most important man in Cuba; sometimes even more important than the president’.
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Cuba, in fact, was a kind of US satellite. But the ending of the Platt Amendment had made it a full independent country – in theory. Therein lay the source of much anger.

Like the vast majority of Latin-American dictators, Cuba’s had always begun as liberals and ended as tyrants, usually becoming reconciled to the US paramountcy in the process. The last old-style dictator, a former liberal, of course, had been Gerardo Machado, thrown out in 1933 by an
NCOS’
coup
led by Fulgencio Batista. This sergeant-stenographer was a genuine man of the people, half-Indian, whose father had been a sugar-worker. He had worked on the plantations himself. He was an extreme radical. The US ambassador, Sumner Welles, thought his regime ‘frankly communistic’ and wanted battleships sent.
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The Communist leader, Blas Roca, called Batista the father of the Popular Front, ‘this magnificent reserve of Cuban democracy’, ‘the people’s idol, the great man of our national politics’.
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Batista ruled as president himself, 1940–4, but usually through others. He was in league with the radical students, and his favourite substitute as president was their leader, Ramón Grau San Martin, who created the Authentic Revolutionary Movement
(Auténticos
, as opposed to
Ortodoxos
, the opposition revolutionaries). But Grau turned out a crook, a weak man run by a grasping mistress. ‘Have a word with Paulina’ was his system of government. By the time that Batista took power himself again, in 1952, the damage was done, and he himself was sucked into the morass of graft. So was virtually everyone else in public life.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Cuba became a radical gangster society. In the old days America would have intervened and imposed somebody honest. Now that was ruled out. But America was necessarily involved in all major Cuban transactions. In the age of
Peronismo
, it was blamed for everything. Cuba illustrated the gap between words and reality which was to become the most striking characteristic of the Third World. Everyone in politics talked revolution
and practised graft. Of course corruption was linked to violence. The presidency of the students’ union at Havana University, an institution almost as important as the army, was settled by guns. The police were not allowed on campus. The campus police were murdered or terrorized. Many students carried Forty-fives, and lectures were punctuated by shots. The Communists were as corrupt as anyone. Grau used to say, when they greeted him with clenched-fist salutes, ‘Don’t worry: tomorrow they will open their fists!’
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The only opponents of corruption were a few rich men, such as the eccentric Eduardo Chibás, leader of the
Ortodoxos
, and even he joined in the violence by fighting duels. The various police forces fought gang-battles with each other; most gangsters held police as well as political rank. The political
pistoleros
, organized in ‘action groups’, and spouting Marxist, fascist or Perónist slogans, were reminiscent of Germany in the early 1920s. Students supplied the worst killers and the most pathetic victims.

One of the student gunmen was Fidel Castro. His father came from Galicia, from a family of right-wing Carlists, and like most Spanish immigrants hated the Americans. He worked for United Fruit, got a farm himself, prospered and ended with 10,000 acres and a labour force of five hundred. His son Fidel became a professional student politician – he never seems to have wanted any other occupation than politics – and, being rich, supported Chibas’s
Ortodoxos.
On his own admission, he carried a gun as a student.
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In 1947, aged twenty, he took part in an invasion of the Dominican Republic by an ‘action group’, armed with a sub-machine gun. The next year he was involved in appalling violence in Bogota, during the Pan-American Conference; he was said to have helped to organize the riots, in which 3,000 were killed.
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The same year he was in a gun-battle with Cuban police, and ten days later was accused of murdering the Minister for Sport. Batista, hearing he was an exceptionally gifted political gangster, tried to enlist him. Castro declined for what he termed ‘generational reasons’. According to a fellow law-student, he was ‘a power-hungry person, completely unprincipled, who would throw in his lot with any group he felt could help his political career’.
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He later claimed his ‘vocation’ was ‘being a revolutionary’. He had the urges, in short, of a Lenin as well as a Hitler: the two streams came together in his violent personality. But, like Perón, he modelled his political prose-style on the Spanish proto-fascist Primo de Rivera until he adopted Marxist clichés.
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