Communist Dogma and Latin America:

...The Philippines, with some tutelage in self-government, has not been subject to the series of tyrannies that have ruled Cuba since its liberation...

...But Latin America cannot pretend to possess the same immunity...

...In Venezuela...

...These facts are, of course, known in Latin America, and may account for the fact that Mexico has been more sympathetic to Castro and more critical of us than our official innocence would justify...

...For our anti-imperialist tradition was powerful enough to prevent us from taking Cuba for ourselves after having liberated the island from Spain...

...These people have long felt the strength of the West's technical prowess—in its imperialist form...

...The tyranny of Fidel Castro is the most tragic of all because of its early promise...

...Capitalism, according to the first dogma, is an organized system of injustice...

...The Cubans, however, knew it to be a subsidy from which American owners of sugar plantations drew the chief benefit...

...It is particularly ironical that Cuba should now be the spearpoint of this charge...

...Not only must the West be willing and able to match the Communists' nuclear capabilities, but it also must be capable of engaging in guerrilla warfare when such a tactic is necessary...

...If the Administration has had a mysterious lapse about Latin America, one can only hope its original awareness of the nature of the danger will still express itself in creative policies...

...Both class injustices and class resentments were increased when technology first impinged upon the old feudalism...

...Why don't you worry more about Latin America right on your door step...

...Although the dogma about the injustice of capitalism in the democratic nations is not true to the facts in most of the West today, and the second dogma about the inevitability of imperialism is only partly true, any action which helps sustain these illusions is a disservice to the democratic cause...

...The healthy Western nations are immune to the Communist virus...

...and also strong enough to make us promise (and keep the promise) to giving the Philippines its freedom...

...The Communist theory of capitalism's injustice has been made irrelevant in Western democracies by a century of tortuous political history...

...Most of the nations of South America have constitutions patterned after our own, but these countries have been ruled either by democracies more or less controlled by the landed aristocrats, or dictatorships, which usually combined military power with demagogic appeals to the poor...

...THE SECOND Communist dogma which makes capitalism the primary root of imperialism, defines the United States as a "classic" (i.e., successful) capitalist nation and an arch imperialist power...

...But our innocence of imperialism cannot change the political facts of life, one of which is that strength impinges upon weakness...

...But the political aspects of our contest with Communism must have top priority...

...The standards of justice implied in the phrase "Welfare State" are now so universal that it can be used to describe such different nations as Socialist Sweden, Tory Britain, capitalistic America and the various combinations of trade union and organized agrarian power in the countries of Northern Europe and the British Commonwealth...

...In this context, it was particularly inept for the Central Intelligence Agency to choose as a chief instrument of the anti-Castro revolution a conservative group which promised to restore "free enterprise" to Cuba...

...It represents a greater peril than the Communist military build-up in Cuba...

...The political struggle with Communism must consist mainly of refuting these dogmas, not by words but by moral and political realities...

...But this accusation is even more plausible to the underdeveloped nations than the first dogma...

...After the Cuban fiasco, perhaps we should take seriously the words of a Polish Communist, who recently said to some American friends: "You Americans worry a lot about Asia...

...Economic imperialism is often so covert that the strong nation is not fully conscious of it, but the weak country is naturally always aware of the facts...

...Many Latin American nations are living in a political climate which corresponds very closely to that of early 19th century Europe, before the beneficial effects of universal suffrage and the organization of trade unions established the necessary balance to the power of the industrial plant...

...We must become sufficiently aware of the realities in the underdeveloped nations to realize that "free enterprise" is not something for which oppressed people will risk their lives, no matter how important it may have been to the West...

...Perhaps we have also forgotten that the Communist-infiltrated Government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala, which in 1954 was rescued from "Communism" and saved for "democracy" by a Cubanstyle operation, had instituted agrarian reform, social security and other important social measures in that Central American nation...

...According to Marxist dogma, industrial culture aggravated, rather than mitigated, the age-old inequalities...

...and Latin American history...

...It is threatened by Communism, not so much because the Russians are building up Cuba militarily, but because social realities in Latin America correspond to the Communist image...

...The second dogma, which Lenin added to the corpus of Communist scripture, asserts that capitalism is the primary root of imperialism...

...Why, they ask, did a very intelligent and perceptive President, who had initiated a new chapter in our Latin American relations with his "Alliance for Progress" program, let himself be persuaded to engage in the abortive venture...

...President Rómulo Betancourt is valiantly trying to establish a viable democracy after the dictatorship of General Marcos Perez Jimenez...

...The Communists are winning their political victories partly by presenting caricatures of the West, derived from the early days of industrialism, to the people of the underdeveloped nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America...

...Thus our high sugar quota for Cuba and our purchase of Cuban sugar at higher than world market rates has long been regarded by uncritical Americans as generosity toward the little nation...

...It is not generally known here that the United Fruit Company dominated the economy of Guatemala, and that the Government which we helped overthrow had raised the wages of the poor peasants on the banana plantations...

...That priority might have been endangered even had the landing in Cuba been successful...

...Only in Mexico has a thoroughgoing revolution and land reform given a democratic regime genuine stability...

...For Communism thrives politically in the undeveloped nations because two of its central dogmas about "capitalism" seem to be plausible in these areas...

...From a military point of view, aiding a revolution in Cuba or elsewhere can serve the cause of democracy...

...The best reason for the invasion has not been fully publicized: Cuba has become the base for a tremendous Communist military build-up, which threatens many of the Latin American nations...

...The seeming plausibility of Communist dogma in Latin America illuminates much of U.S...

...From the available evidence, our Cuban venture constituted a serious, though perhaps not mortal wound to this program...

...A Mexican philosopher has remarked: "You do not know what a trial it is to be a weak neighbor of a nation at once so powerful and so innocent as you are...

...The different fates of Cuba and the Philippines, incidentally, reveal that so-called imperialism is not the unalloyed evil which the Communist dogma makes it out to be...

...We cannot afford to discount the military aspects of our contest with Communism...

...President Kennedy's "Alliance for Progress" program was the first genuine effort to use our nation's economic power to help our hemispheric neighbors to change their social patterns and undertake land reform and a system of universal education—measures designed to mitigate the social inequalities which abstract political constitutionalism does not touch...

...This charge seems even wider of the mark to the U.S., which regards itself as innocent of imperialism except for the appropriation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American war...

...The dictatorships of Getulio Vargas in Brazil, Juan Perón in Argentina and Fulgencio Batista in Cuba conformed to this latter pattern...

...In Latin America, the prevailing social pattern is one of agrarian feudalism, aggravated ethnically by the conjoining of a Spanish or Portuguese aristocracy and an Indian peasantry...

...Western democracies have attained a tolerable justice within the realities created by an industrial civilization by a gradual development of both political and economic equilibria which corrected the first effects of industrialism...