Help!!

Questions to answer:

How does Winn approach the subject of Latin American History?

What is the author’s disciplinary background and academic training?

Does the author seem to have a particular premise or thesis about Latin American History?

Does the author have any noticeable biases?

How does the author deal with issues of gender?

What are some of the strengths you noticed about the book? What are the weaknesses?

Source: (attached)

THIRD EDITION

PETER WINN

In P eru , the M aoist Sendero Luminoso o r Shinin p
by expan ding its “People’s W: ,, . ‘ . g ath, defi ed pos t-Cold War trends

. ar mto a sen ous r evolutiona thr In L. ,
prison , captured Send eri stas show th . di . lin ry ea t. 1ma s women’s
Gonza lo,” n ow in prison himself An err sc1p e_ and loyalty to th eir leader, “President
h · anny attack m April 19 hi h kill d undred prison ers ended S d . 92 • w c e over one

‘ en ensta control of their cell blocks.

THIRTEEN

Making Revolution

In the cold clear morning of the Andean highlands, the peasant partisans

of the Shining Path were drawn up in ranks against an azure sky. Thei

r

faces were brown and weather-beaten, their features and clothing

marked their Indian ancestry. Their weapons were primitive, in many

cases just sickles attached to long sticks. To the historian, they seemed an

evocation of revolutions in China or Russia whose time had come and

gone. Yet, here they were, in April 1992, after the collapse of communism

on other continents, chanting its slogans, talking with confidence and de-

termination about the inevitable triumph of their revolution under the

banner of their Communist party and the Maoist ideology of the leader

they idolized as “President Gonzalo.” “The old society was unjust. There

were landlords who oppressed and exploited the people,” asserted Com-

missar Francisco. “We have learned much from the Party. With the

People’s War we have swept away the landlords, using a broom of steel

as taught to us by President Gonzalo.”1 The fire of communism may have

gone out elsewhere, but in the Peruvian Andes the flame of socialist rev-

olution burned brighter than ever.

Viewed from North America, Latin America and the Caribbean seem

lands of social unrest and political turmoil, where bullets are more com-

mon than ballots and revolutionaries are always waiting in the wings. Re-

526 I Americas

hellions have been common in the region, but successful revolutions-

the seizure of power in order to transform politics and values, restructure

economies, and redistribute wealth, status, and opportunity-have been

rare. Between the Haitian revolution of 1791 and the Mexican revolution

of 19rn, more than a century went by without a profound social revolu-

tion shaking the Americas. Another half century would elapse before the

Cuban revolution of 1959 would successfully challenge the hemispheric

status quo, inaugurating three decades of revolutionary upheaval that

would bring the Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua and guerrilla move-

ments to much of the region. In the 1990s, with the disintegration of the

Soviet Union, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, the peace processes

in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the economic crisis in Cuba, this cycle

of revolution seemed to be coming to an end. But the rebellions of the

Shining Path in Peru and the Zapatistas in Mexico raised the question :

Is a new revolutionary cycle beginning?

Predictions of imminent revolution have been frequent in Latin

America and the Caribbean during this century, in response to condi-

tions that afford ample justification for rebellion. Certainly, if poverty

and oppression, economic inequality, and unrepresentative government

were sufficient causes for revolution, it would be far more common in the

Americas. But revolutionary upheavals have generally required some-

thing more. Paradoxically, the roots of revolution have often been nour-

ished by economic progress. The integration of the region into the world

order has also generated vulnerable economies, social dislocations, and

political tensions, while raising popular aspirations and democratic ex-

pectations. The costs of this “progress” and the frustration of these ex-

pectations contributed to the success of revolutionary movements in

Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua-and to revolutionary ferment through-

out the region.

In all three successful revolutions, the identification of the old regime

with foreign interests added the flag of nationalism to the banner of re-

bellion. This helped persuade some members of the elite and middle

classes to lead the rebellions and others to support them. Its narrowed

Making Revolution I 5 2 7

base of support weakened the old order, and this weakness was as im-

portant to the rebels’ victory as their own strength.

But the overthrow of the old regime and the destruction of its army

did not end the struggle for power. Revolutionary movements are often

coalitions, united in their opposition to the status quo, but divided by

varying visions of the new order to erect in its place. The fall of the old

order has often led to new conflicts over power and policy, which were

won by those who mobilized the greatest military and political support.

In these contests, foreign powers also played a role, as backers of revolu-

tionary factions or as symbols of external interference used by revolu-

tionary leaders to rally popular support.
The resolution of these power struggles-and the promises made dur-

ing their course-shaped the character of the revolutions that followed.

Despite their differences, the Mexican, Cuban, and Nicaraguan revolu-

tions all redefined the language of politics and altered their countries’

economic and social policy agendas. Moreover, revolutionary regimes in

all three countries conferred on their citizens an enhanced sense of na-

tional pride and personal self-worth by promoting a nationalistic popu-

lar culture and by standing up to the United States.

Revolutions in the Americas pose special problems for the United

States, the hemisphere’s principal power. Challenges to the status quo in

its sphere of influence are unwelcome in Washington, particularly as

U.S. dominance in the region often gives revolutionary nationalism an

anti-American cast. The stirrings of radical unrest in the region have

often led the United States to intervene in defense of its perceived strate-

gic, economic, and political interests. They have also focused the atten-

tions of the United States on a region that it has often taken for granted,

impelling it to rethink its policies and even to recast its hemispheric re-

lations. Viewed from the United States, revolutions in Latin America and

the Caribbean carry the special urgency of revolutions in its sphere.

The Mexican, Cuban, and Nicaraguan revolutions also had a major

impact on the rest of the region. They were viewed as models to emulate

and as symbols to sustain elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean.

528 / Americas

But what did it mean to be a revolutionary in the 1990s? It was a ques-

tion answered differently in El Salvador, where an armed struggle took

an electoral course, in Peru, where a Maoist movement mounted a vio-

lent challenge to the old order, and in Mexico, where Indian peasants

staged a post-Communist revolt.

REVOLUTIONARY ECHOES

“Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees,” a dying Mexican

rebel is said to have scrawled with his blood on a Cuernavaca wall. It

might have been the motto for his country’s epic revolution. In 1910,

landless peasants, dispossessed ranchers, and ill-paid laborers rose up

against General Porfirio Diaz’s oppressive regime, which had forced

them to pay the social costs of Mexico’s integration into the global econ-

omy, with its stress on exports and foreign investment, while excluding

them from a fair share of its economic benefits and political participation.

The Mexican revolution was the century’s first mass upheaval, and it

would have a major impact on the rest of Latin America.

Viewed from up close, the Mexican revolution seemed an unlikely

model to emulate. Its factions exhibited little social or ideological co-

herence and fought each other with a ruthlessness that belied their once

common cause. Its leaders ranged from dissident oligarchs, frustrated en-

trepreneurs, and provincial teachers to labor organizers, village chiefs,

and cattle rustlers. During the years that followed their military triumph

in 1920, the ruling “northern dynasty” of revolutionary generals seemed

more concerned with consolidating power than with transforming their

society-though Education Minister Jose Vasconcelos did promote rural

literacy and a nationalistic popular culture that reevaluated Mexico’s In-

dian heritage. The Depression of the 1930s did bring to power Lazaro

Cardenas, a revolutionary populist who delivered on the revolution’s

long-delayed promise ofland reform, backed labor unions in their strug-

gles with foreign-owned corporations, and expropriated U.S. oil compa-

nies and utilities. Cardenas also promoted a “Mexican socialism,” a na-

Making Revolution I 529

tionalistic blend of socialist ideas with images of an idealized pre-

Hispanic past such as the ejido, or agrarian reform community, whose

beneficiaries, peasants like Marfa Luz Ojeda in Zacatecas, still venerated

Cardenas half a century later. But after World War II the revolutionary

pendulum swung back to the right, with a corrupt and repressive regime

promoting industry and export agriculture in partnership with Mexican

entrepreneurs and U.S. corporations. By 1991, when President Carlos

Salinas buried its last vestige, the agrarian reform-by allowing ejido

lands to be sold and large estates to be formed-the Mexican revolution

was long dead. In Zacatecas, angry peasants protested that this meant a

“return to the old hacienda system, with a few large landowners” and that

“the peasant will go back to being a slave, like before the revolution.”

Yet, for revolutionaries elsewhere in the region, the Mexican revolu-

tion was a source of inspiration. Mexico’s labor unions might be corrupt,

but Augusto Cesar Sandino, who worked in the Tampico oil fields dur-

ing the 1920s before returning to Nicaragua to take up arms against U.S.

intervention, came away from Mexico excited by its favoring the rights

of workers in their struggles with foreign companies. Nor was Sandino

alone in seeing solutions to his country’s problems in Mexico’s revolu-

tionary model. Land reform, the demand of peasant leader Emiliano Za-

pata, and the transformation most associated with the Mexican revolu-

tion, became an obligatory banner of every subsequent revolution in

Latin America and the Caribbean. Mexico’s commitment to its Indian

peoples may have been more rhetorical than real, but its ideology of in-

digenismo resonated in countries with large indigenous populations, such

as Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala. Vasconcelos’s faith in popular education

as the solution for his country’s poor would also find imitators elsewhere,

while the legacy of the nationalist popular culture that he promoted

would be painted on the walls of Allende’s Chile and Sandinista

Nicaragua long after Mexico’s own revolutionary murals had become

mere tourist attractions.

But it was Cardenas’s bold economic nationalism that made the deep-

est impression on the rest of the Americas. After the Mexican revolution,

530 I Americas

neither foreign investment nor private property seemed sacrosanct in

Latin America, and the issue of nationalization was on the political

agenda of the revolutions that followed. Moreover, after World War II,

Mexico’s rulers compensated for the freezing of revolution at home by a

prorevolutionary stance in their foreign policy. Fidel Castro was one o

f

many Latin American revolutionaries who found a refuge in Mexico.

From there he set sail in 1956 for Cuba on a voyage that led to a revolu-

tion whose radicalism, evangelical fervor, and hemispheric impact would

exceed Mexico’s own.

REVOLUTIONIZING CUBA

It was 1985 and Fidel Castro’s beard was flecked with gray. The once

young guerrilla leader was now pushing sixty and he no longer smoked

his trademark Cohiba cigars, but the Comandante’s energy and enthusi-

asm were still unflagging and his charisma was much in evidence. It was

after midnight, the hours in which he read, wrote-and gave interviews.

“Revolutionaries are not born, they are made,” he stressed, “by poverty,

inequality, and dictatorship.”

Like the Mexican revolution, the Cuban revolution of r 959 was a seis-

mic historical event. It not only transformed the Caribbean’s largest is-

land, but also had a major impact on the rest of the Americas, revealing

the new limits of U.S. hegemony and catalyzing a reshaping of hemi-

spheric relations. As in Mexico, the roots of Cuba’s revolution were nour-

ished by the island’s reincorporation into the world order that began in

the late nineteenth century. A Spanish colony until 1898, Cuba-like

Panama-became a republic under U.S. auspices, which limited its in-

dependence but assured its modernization. With Washington guaran-

teeing political stability and a good investment climate, U.S. capital

poured into the island, ensuring Cuba’s position as the world’s leading

sugar producer.

Enormous sugar mill complexes were created, factories in the field

that consumed huge quantities of land and labor, converting Cuban

Making Revolution I 5 3 r

landowners into dependent farmers and peasants into proletarians.

Cuba’s prosperity came to depend on sugar, which accounted for 80 per-

cent of its export earnings, but was vulnerable to fluctuating world

prices. The result was a dizzying pattern of boom and bust-such as the

“dance of the millions” in 1920-21, when sugar prices soared over

twenty-two cents a pound only to plunge below four cents a pound-in

which fortunes were made and lost, while U.S. control of sugar produc-

tion and processing grew. Cuba’s sugar industry never recovered its dy-

namism after the Depression of the 1930s, and by the 1950s depended

on its privileged access to a subsidized U.S. market. At the same time, the

sugar industry’s monopolization of land and labor made it difficult for

Cuba to feed itself, creating the paradox of a fertile island living on food-

stuffs imported from Florida at an inflated cost.

This was not the only Cuban paradox. National statistics showed

Cuba to be one of the wealthiest countries in the region-whether the

measure was income, doctors, or telephones-but these benefits were

unevenly distributed socially and geographically, with poor rural Cubans

the most deprived. Fidel Castro was not the only critic to charge that

Cuba was “a rich country with too many poor people.”

The overweening U.S. presence in Cuba was another source of re-

sentment. By 1928, U.S. investors controlled three quarters of Cuba’s

sugar, as well as strategic sectors from banking to utilities. Three decades

later they accounted for 8 5 percent of all foreign investment, and the

United States for two thirds of Cuba’s exports and three quarters of its

imports. It was little wonder that “Cuba for the Cubans” was a cry of re-

formers from the 1930s to the 1950s and would prove a popular revolu-

tionary goal in the 1960s.

This economic dominance was reinforced by a political ascendancy

that had begun with the Spanish-American War, which freed Havana

from Madrid but turned Cuba into a U.S. protectorate. Under the no-

torious Platt Amendment of 1901 that Washington imposed on the new

republic, the United States had the right to intervene in Cuba’s internal

affairs. During the two decades that followed, it landed troops four times

5 J2 / Americas

and sent proconsuls on other occasions. A flicker of reform in 1933 was

snuffed out by U.S. opposition. The Platt Amendment was finally re-

nounced in 1934, but U.S. hegemony remained. Earl Smith, the last U.S.

ambassador before Castro’s revolution, described himself as “the second

most important man in Cuba”-after the dictator, General Fulgencio
Batista.

If Cuba’s stagnant economy and unequal society provided the kindling

for Castro’s revolution, and U.S. domination the flame of resentment it
‘

was Batista’s dictatorship that sparked the conflagration. The extended

U.S. political tutelage had aroused Cuban expectations of democracy

without laying the foundation for its consolidation. From the 1920s on,

Washington supported pro-U.S. strongmen over nationalistic democ-

rats. Our final man in Havana was General Batista, who seized power for

the last time in 1952 in a military coup that prevented an election he was

sure to lose and reformers were favored to win. This frustration of dem-

ocratic aspirations would ignite the revolt.

Among the leaders of this rebellion was a young lawyer named Fidel

Castro, who led a quixotic attack on the Moncada army barracks, the

country’s second largest, on July 26, 1953; it was a military failure but a

political success, capturing the popular imagination and founding a rev-

olutionary movement. At his trial, Castro turned the tables on his ac-

cusers, placing the regime on trial for violating Cuban civil liberties and

political rights in an electrifying courtroom defense that concluded:

“Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.”2 He was

sentenced to prison, but released in a 1955 amnesty and exiled to Mex-

ico. There he prepared the rebel force that landed in eastern Cuba in De-

cember 1956. Plans to coordinate this landing with a popular insurrec-

tion in Santiago, Cuba’s second city, went awry, but a few survivors made

their way to the nearby Sierra Maestra, where they began guerrilla war-

fare . Two years later they would enter Havana in triumph.

Castro’s victory was based on a growing mastery of guerrilla warfare,

increasing peasant support, and a strong urban underground. But most

of all, Castro’s success stemmed from Batista’s weakness: his lack of com-

Making Revolution I 533

mitted support. When victory eluded the dictator, his troops deserted,

his civilian backing faded, and the United States abandoned him. As rebel

columns streamed toward Havana in late 1958, Batista’s army disinte-

grated and the “strongman” fled the country.

The rebellion was over, but the revolution had just begun. When

Fidel Castro and his bearded young guerrillas descended from the Sierra

Maestra and made their way across Cuba to Havana in January 1959, few

among the millions who cheered their triumphal procession could be

certain what their victory portended. Within the rebel ranks were vary-

ing visions of the path that their “revolution” should take. Many were

middle-class moderates, like Mario Llerena, a rebel emissary abroad,

whose notion of revolution was confined to the establishment of politi-

cal democracy and some mild social reforms, and who believed that

“there was no desire, no expectation, and no need for a radical revolu-

tion.”l Others, including some of Castro’s closest companions, such as his

brother Raul and the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara, were Marxists

who equated revolution with socialism. Still others, including Castro

himself, were influenced both by the revolutionary humanism of Jose

Marti, Cuba’s independence hero, and by their own experience of Cuba’s

underdevelopment and inequalities. Their ideology might not be fixed,

but they were determined “to revolutionize Cuba from the bottom up.”

The contest among these factions was at once a struggle for power and

a battle between rival revolutionary visions.

It was a struggle that Castro and the radicals won easily, a victory that

reflected Castro’s own ascendancy within his movement and control of

the rebel army. It also stemmed from his ability to rally the overwhelm-

ing majority of Cubans to his side. They responded to Castro’s charisma

and they identified their revolution with him: “If Fidel is Communist,

then so are we” became the refrain. But they also responded to the rad-

ical thrust of his revolution, which implemented an agrarian reform,

raised real wages, eliminated illiteracy, promoted social programs, and

stood up to the United States, eventually expropriating more than one

billion dollars in U.S. properties. Many Cubans opposed Castro’s radi-

534 / Americas

calism. Over ro percent of the population of six million went into exile,

most to the nearby United States, but many to other countries of the

Americas. Their departure eased Castro’s path to power.

Castro won the struggle for power in increasingly close alliance with

Cuba’s Communist party, which had opposed Castro initially and played

little part in the rebel victory, but which enjoyed sizable support among

organized labor. For the Communists, Castro offered access to power

and the opportunity to make the socialist revolution they themselves had

never been able to win. For Castro, the Communist alliance provided

disciplined working-class support at a time when his radicalism was

alienating his original middle-class political base. It also helped him se-

cure the backing of the Soviet Union, which he needed in order to sur-

vive his growing confrontation with the United States.

For the United States, Castro’s increasing Communist ties were as

worrying as his agrarian reform, whose major targets were U.S. sugar

companies. By mid-1959, the Wall Street Journal was warning that “the

Revolution may be like a watermelon. The more they slice it the redder

it gets.”4 As actor and as symbol, the United States played a central part

in Cuba’s internal power struggle. This reflected the traditional U.S. role

as the ultimate arbiter of Cuban politics, plus Washington’s distrust of

Castro and his revolution. Though the United States had pressured

Batista to leave office in late 1958, it had also tried to prevent Castro

from assuming power by arranging a military alternative. When this

failed, Washington threw its support to the moderates within Castro’s

own movement, which the Cuban leader used to discredit them. Their

defeat left the United States with the stark choice of accepting Castro’s

victory and coming to terms with his radical vision of a new Cuba, or else

trying to overthrow him. Predictably, with a revolution on its doorstep,

Washington chose confrontation over compromise.

But the emergence of the Soviet Union as a rival superpower and al-

ternative patron for Cuba meant that the economic and diplomatic pres-

sures that had persuaded Havana to follow the U.S. lead in the past were

no longer sufficient. Washington’s final option was force. Covert inter-

Making Revolution I 5 3 5

vention had undermined the leftist Arbenz government in Guatemala in

1954, and the CIA was given a chance to repeat that success. The CIA

recruited and trained an exile army, confident that its landing would det-

onate a popular rebellion against the man the U.S . viewed as a Commu-

nist dictator. But this strategy came to grief in April 1961 at the Bay of

Pigs, “a perfect failure,” which revealed Castro’s political support and

military strength to be far greater than Washington had believed.

In the wake of his Bay of Pigs victory, Castro consolidated both his

personal power and his revolution’s socialist definition, wrapping both in

the mantle of nationalism. On the eve of the invasion, one million

Cubans gathered in Havana’s Revolution Square to hear Fidel declare

their revolution socialist. As a mock coffin of Uncle Sam was passed from

hand to hand, Castro asked the crowd to “vote” for or against socialism.

A thunderous roar of approval gave him the answer he wanted: Cuba was

now in the socialist camp. The missile crisis of the following year only

confirmed that reality. President John F. Kennedy may have faced down

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and forced Moscow to withdraw its

offensive missiles from Cuba, but in return the U.S. gave assurances that

it would not invade the island. At the time, Castro was outraged at

Khrushchev’s failure to consult him, but he later admitted that

“Khrushchev was right.” The resolution of the missile crisis meant the

consolidation of his revolution.

But revolution is a process that unfolds over time. During the next

three decades, Castro steered his revolution on a gyrating course. A 1961

campaign based on student volunteers that succeeded in virtually wiping

out illiteracy in one year underscored for Castro the power of revolu-

tionary consciousness and mass mobilization to overcome seemingly in-

surmountable obstacles. He followed the same strategy in his drive to de-

velop Cuba economically while creating a heterodox Utopian socialism

based on moral-not material-incentives, which would refute both

U.S. laws of capitalist economics and the Soviet model of socialist stages.

Its proof was to be a ten-million-ton sugar harvest by 1970, almost dou-

ble Cuba’s previous record, and Castro mobilized his nation to meet this

536 I Americas

symbolic goal. When that harvest failed to reach ten million tons, and led

to widespread economic dislocation and political disillusionment, Castro

took personal responsibility for the debacle. Years later he excused these

mistakes of his youth as “errors of idealism: We wanted to build com-

munism without first passing through socialism.”

For much of the 1960s, Cuban economic strategy followed Fidel Cas-

tro’s changing enthusiasms-for and against sugar and industry, cattle

and coffee-and the joke was that “his checkbook was Cuba’s budget” in

a system of “unplanned planning” with “more checks than balances.” Be-

ginning in the 1970s, Castro embraced Communist orthodoxy, moved

closer to Moscow, and adapted Soviet institutions and models to Cuban

conditions. By 1989, a synthesis of Soviet and Cuban experience seemed

consolidated in Cuba, and a postrevolutionary society had emerged. A

balance of three decades of revolution could be drawn up.

Revolution had created far greater changes in Cuba than in Mexico.

Few private enterprises remained and the economy was guided by cen-

tral planning. A one-party Communist state had been established with

unprecedented power to mobilize resources and reshape society. The old

class structure had been leveled and Cuba claimed the most equal soci-

ety in the Americas, although new status distinctions had emerged, based

on revolutionary roles and political connections. Literacy and education

were universal, medical care was free, and life expectancy approached

U.S. levels.

Rural Cuba had benefited most. Bayamo, the Sierra Maestra province

where Castro had established his guerrilla headquarters, was one of

Cuba’s poorest and least developed regions in 1959. Twenty-five years

later, its modest rural homes sprouted television antennas and pastel-

painted schools dotted its hillsides, including innovative coeducational

boarding schools where students worked half the day in the fields. In the
provincial capital, where a Nestle dairy had been the sole ind1,1stry,

thirty-five factories provided employment, and local citizens prided

themselves on their medical clinics and cultural centers. Unlike many

rural areas in Latin America and the Caribbean, Bayamo had held its

Making Revolution I 5 3 7

population in the interim, as the revolution’s heavy investment in the

countryside stemmed the tide of migration inundating cities in the rest

of the region. People spoke of the difference that the revolution had

made in their lives and in those of their better fed, better dressed, and

better educated children.
Yet, for all the dramatic changes, some of the salient features-and

problems-of prerevolutionary Cuba remained, albeit in new guises. In-
dustry had made significant strides, but sugar still accounted for the bulk

of the country’s exports. The revolution had recorded impressive gains

in education and public health, but their quality was debatable and many

Cubans found their material aspirations unfulfilled. Mass organizations

and local “popular power” institutions gave Cubans greater political par-

ticipation than before the revolution, but not the Western-style democ-

racy and civil liberties that many Cubans desired. The seamy side of the

Cuban revolution was hidden behind the prison walls where political dis-

sidents languished. Social conformity was enforced by revolutionary

block committees and shoddy Soviet goods were part of the price for

Cuba’s dependence on Moscow’s trade and aid.

Although Castro’s Cuba was no longer dependent economically on

the United States in 1989, it seemed to have exchanged that dependency

for a niche in COMECON, the Soviet bloc common market. This was

the source of Cuba’s comparative prosperity during the 1980s crisis that

hit other countries in the region, but a far cry from the young guerrillas’

dreams of economic autonomy and industrial development. Since 1989,

moreover, the collapse of communism and disintegration of the Soviet

Union have revealed just how vulnerable revolutionary Cuba remains to

foreign events beyond its control. By mid-1991, COMECON was his-

tory, the Cuban economy was in deep trouble, and even a Cuban Com-

munist who stressed his strong support for the revolution reflected rue-

fully in Havana that “dependency is bad, no matter what side of the river

it’s on.”
The Cuban Revolution survived the century-itself a victory given

the global collapse of Communism and intensified U.S . hostility-but it

538 / Americas

would be a distorted and impoverished revolution, dependent on tourist

dollars and exile remittances, which had compromised its socialist model,

if not its commitment. In 2005, the equality that was the revolution’s

proud accomplishment was a thing of the past. By then, however, Cuba’s

economy had started to grow again, and the discovery of oil in 2004 led

to predictions that better times lay ahead.

Yet, whatever the current state and ultimate fate of the Cuban revo-

lution, its impact on the Americas is incontrovertible. For some, Cuba

was a model to emulate, for others a threat to combat, but there were few

neutrals where Castro’s revolution was concerned.

THE GUERRILLA DECADE

“The duty of revolutionaries is to make revolution,” Fidel Castro pro-

claimed in February 1962.5 Throughout the hemisphere and across the

political spectrum there was the hope-or fear-that Latin America was

ripe for revolution, and that the Cuban revolution would sweep over the

region as the French revolution had once swept across Europe, ending

oppressive old regimes and replacing them with a new egalitarian order.

The dream of another Cuba inspired young revolutionaries throughout

the region to exchange their books for rifles and to head for the hills in

the expectation of repeating Fidel Castro’s success in their own countries.

None triumphed until the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1979, but

their efforts to do so made the 1960s the “Guerrilla Decade.”

It also made “No More Cubas” the priority of U.S. policy in the re-

gion. Within this context, President Kennedy promoted the Alliance for

Progress, a program of ambitious social and economic reforms designed

to deprive Castro’s imitators elsewhere in the region of the social base for

revolution. “All people of this hemisphere are entitled to a decent way of

life,” he warned. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will

make violent revolution inevitable.” But the Alliance soon ran aground

on the rocks of anticommunism and self-interest, and then lost its way as

Washington placed increasing priority on military assistance to counter

t
I .

Making Revolution I 539

guerrilla insurgencies. When Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy in the

White House in late 1963, backing for democratic reformers withered in

Washington and support for anticommunist dictatorships grew.

The fear of another Cuba at first motivated some Latin American and

Caribbean elites to carry out economic and social reforms from above in

the hope of forestalling a revolution from below. But it also led the mid-

dle classes-whom the Alliance envisioned as a repository of democratic

values-to support authoritarian regimes and harsh military measures to

deal with real or imagined revolutionary threats. One way or another, the

shadow of Cuba’s 1959 revolution shaped the hemispheric history of the

decades that followed as a contest between revolutionary movements and

their opponents.
In this continentwide struggle, Venezuela emerged as a key battle-

ground. Fortunate to possess the region’s largest oil fields, Venezuela also

had its second largest per capita income. But this wealth was unevenly

distributed, as were its fertile lands. In the democratic wave that followed
World War II, a reform movement led by Acci6n Democnitica (AD), a

social democratic party, came to power in 1945. But it was overthrown

by a military coup in 1948, and replaced by the corrupt and repressive

dictatorship of General Marcos Perez Jimenez. He was ousted in 1958

after a popular rebellion spread to the armed forces, bringing AD’s R6-

mulo Betancourt to power at roughly the same time as Fidel Castro, on

seemingly similar platforms after the defeat of strikingly similar dicta-

torships. Castro visited Caracas in 1959 and received a warm welcome.

But, as they consolidated power, the two leaders moved in opposite di-

rections, with Betancourt moderating his once radical reform stance,

while Castro radicalized his reformist agenda. By 1962, Castro and Be-

tancourt were sworn enemies and leftist guerrillas had taken up arms

against the Venezuelan president.
Many of them were middle-class students, youthful former members

of AD like Moses Moleiro, who had become disillusioned with Betan-

court’s declining commitment to radical change and inspired by Castro’s

revolutionary example: “We saw that while our leaders had been talking

540 I Americas

about revolution for thirty years, in Cuba the revolution triumphed in

two years of fighting; while R6mulo Betancourt had been talking about

agrarian reform for thirty years, and governed twice without doing any-

thing about it, in Cuba a far-reaching agrarian reform was taking place.”6

In response, they left Acci6n Democratica, formed the Movement of the

Revolutionary Left (MIR) in 1960, and began preparing for “armed
struggle.” Other guerrillas were Venezuelan Communists who had taken

part in the rebellion that ousted Perez Jimenez and were impatient with

their own party’s preference for democratic reform in a situation that

they believed was ripe for revolution. In the view of Fabricio Ojeda, a

leader of these revolutionary Communists, “Venezuela was an erupting
volcano.” 7

Militant strikes and slum riots and a 1962 uprising by sympathetic

army units underscored the possibilities of urban insurrection. But

Venezuelan guerrilla leaders followed Castro’s example and headed for

mountainous rural zones to begin rural guerrilla warfare, reducing the

cities to rear bases of support. The Acci6n Democratica government

countered by accelerating its agrarian reform, jailing leftist political

leaders, and intensifying its military counterinsurgency with U .S. assis-

tance. By 1969, when the opposition Christian Democrats elected Rafael

Caldera president, Venezuela’s guerrilla movements were no longer a

threat, the left was deeply divided, and some of its most important advo-

cates of armed struggle were now arguing for accepting Caldera’s offer

of amnesty and returning to electoral politics. In a democratic Venezuela ,
the need for “armed struggle” was less clear than in Batista’s Cuba.

Moreover, in a country where two out of three people lived in urban

areas, “guerrilla action depends on developments in the town,” argued

Teodoro Petkoff, a Communist leader and brother of a rural guerrilla

commander.
8
When Petkoff left the Communist party in 1970, it was to

found the democratic Movement to Socialism (MAS), with the goal of

forming a broad leftist electoral alliance and formulating a “Venezuelan

road to socialism.” In 1998, he was a minister and MAS a partner in an-
other Caldera government.

Making Revolution I 541

A year later, when Hugo Chavez, a military populist, became presi-

dent, Fidel Castro was a special guest at his inauguration. Chavez had

fought the guerrillas in the 1960s, but had been radicalized by the expe-

rience. With President Chavez echoing leftist critiques of Venezuela’s

elitist politics and unequal society it seemed as if the guerrillas had finally

won. Many of them joined his “Bolivarian Revolution,” which survived

U.S. hostility, strikes, coup attempts, and a plebiscite to consolidate it-

self by 2005 on a base of high oil prices and strong support from the

urban poor. Ali Rodriguez-formerly known as Comandante Fausto-

became foreign minister.

Although the guerrilla movements in each country had their own his-

tories, and some were more successful than others, the problems experi-

enced in Venezuela-military mistakes, political divisions, and a weak so-

cial base-were common throughout the region. In response to these

defeats, the Cubans published Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution?

as a how-to manual of guerrilla revolution based on the Cuban model, and

formed OLAS-the Organization of Latin American Solidarity-as a re-

gional revolutionary international to provide the political support lacking

from local Communist parties and their Moscow patrons.

In 1967, Che Guevara himself-the prototype and theorist of the

rural guerrilla-began guerrilla warfare in Bolivia with the goal of”turn-

ing the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of South America” and aiding the

global revolutionary struggle by creating “two, three, many Vietnams.”9

A year later he was dead at the hands of U.S.-trained troops. Guevara was

the victim of the same combination of strategic and tactical errors, feuds

with local Communists, and lack of a sufficient peasant base that had

doomed other Latin American efforts to emulate Cuba’s example. In the

wake of Guevara’s death, Havana seemed to give up on the possibilities

of Cuban-style revolution in the Americas. Instead, Castro supported the

wide array of “revolutionary” movements that emerged in countries with

differing conditions and traditions-from urban guerrillas such as

Uruguay’s Tupamaros to Salvador Allende’s “democratic road to social-

ism” in Chile.

542 / Americas

The blocking of these varying revolutionary roads by U.S.-backed

armed forces-and in particular the 1973 military coup in Chile-per-

suaded Castro that Washington would not allow even a democratic rev-

olution to succeed in the Americas. In the mid-197os, Castro redirected

his revolutionary hopes and Cuban efforts to Africa, while seeking a rap-

prochement in the Americas with regimes he had once sought to over-

throw. High on his list was Venezuela, led by Carlos Andres Perez, who

had been a tough interior minister during the counterinsurgency cam-

paign of the mid- 196os. As president from 1974 to 1979, however, Perez

led efforts to reintegrate a more restrained Cuba into the inter-American

system. Although the United States succeeded in blocking these initia-

tives within regional organizations such as the Organization of American

States (OAS), several Latin American and Caribbean nations renewed

diplomatic relations with Cuba. It was a sign of the growing determina-

tion of the region’s countries to shape a hemispheric policy independent

of Washington’s dictates, which would surface with far greater force with

the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979.

THE REVOLUTION OF THE “MUCHACHOS”

The convoy of jeeps wound its way through the jungle-covered moun-

tains of northern Nicaragua, with soldiers deploying up the hillsides at

turns in areas where Contra guerrillas were active. It was January 1983,

and Sandinista vice president Sergio Ramirez was leading a group of cab-

inet ministers in a whirlwind weekend tour of the provinces.

Each stop revealed another facet of the revolution they led and the

problems it faced . At a Matagalpa farm, committed students spending

their Christmas vacation picking coffee beans worried about recent

Contra attacks that had claimed several lives not far from where they

were gathering the vital harvest, on which Nicaragua depended for

badly needed export income. In another production center, a grimy mi-

grant worker embraced “Comandante Lea” Guido, the minister of

health, and reminded her of the time they fought together against So-

Making Revolution I 543

moza’s National Guard. Nearby, teenage teachers at a school empty of

equipment complained of the lack of resources with which to follow up

their successful literacy campaign. At an isolated estate that had once be-

longed to a Somoza general, a group of resettled Miskito Indians ~tood

in stony silence listening to Vice President Ramirez, an accomplished

writer, deliver a speech in elegant Spanish, a language they didn’t un-

derstand. The day ended at a rural retreat, but there was no respite for

the weary ministers. Local landowners came to complain about low gov-

ernment prices for agrarian products, which were responsible for de-

clining production levels and the increasing smuggling of cattle across

the border into Honduras.
Over glasses of white rum, youthful ministers talked of how they had

left school to join the Sandinista revolution; how they had spent their

college years learning instead how to defeat the Somoza dictatorship.

“We had no time to learn how to govern,” explained Comandante

Monica Baltodano, a former guerrilla leader who had become minister

of regional affairs, responsible for an ambitious decentralization pro-

gram. “But we thought that defeating Somoza was the hard part, that the

revolution itself would be easy. Now we know we were wrong.”

The Sandinistas were the first to follow Castro’s guerrilla path to

power. What made the Sandinista success particularly striking wa~ that

it took place in the Central American country longest under U.S. mflu-

ence, a nation ruled by a second-generation dictator educated at West

Point and commanding a modern U.S .-armed and -trained National

Guard.
In Nicaragua, as in Mexico and Cuba, economic modernization and

political dictatorship bred the conditions for social revolution. Coffee ex-

ports had led Nicaragua’s integration into the international economy

after 1870, but they had lost their dynamism in the Depression of the

1930s. After World War IT, a cotton boom compensated for ~e stagn_a-

tion of coffee exports, but this economic success came at a high social

cost. Subsistence farming gave way to commercial agriculture and some

two hundred thousand peasants were forced off their newly valuable

544 / Americas

lands. Some joined the ranks of ill-paid migrant laborers. Many more

swelled the tide of migration to Managua, Nicaragua’s burgeoning cap-

ital. There they eked out a living in urban shantytowns where most res-

idents were unemployed and most families impoverished. These dis-

placed peasants and desperate slum-dwellers would be prime recruits for

the Sandinista rebellion.

Dictatorship had been a central issue in modem Nicaragua since the

1930s, when National Guard commander Anastasio Somoza arranged

the murder of Augusto Sandino and then took over the government. By

the 1970s, three Somozas-Anastasio (1936-56) and his sons Luis and

Anastasio-had ruled Nicaragua, imposing a corrupt dictatorship more

long-lived than Porfirio Diaz’s and more ruthless than Fulgencio Batista’s.

By then the Somoza family controlled a quarter of the country’s arable land

and twenty-six of its largest corporations. They had also used their power
\

to undermine the position of dissident elites, to create a new elite of their

own cronies, and to repress the protests of workers and peasants who had

paid the price of the Somozas’ vision of modernity. In imposing a dynastic

dictatorship, the Somozas had personalized Nicaraguan politics. This

made it possible for the rebels to unite a socially diverse alliance against the

regime: The Somoza dictatorship was the central issue in the revolt.

As in Mexico and Cuba, nationalism reinforced the demand for revo-

lutionary change and gave it an anti-U.S. cast. Nicaragua had been the

first Central American country to be invaded by North Americans in

1855-when Tennessee adventurer William Walker made himself

Nicaragua’s president-and the first to be occupied by U.S. Marines, in

1908. The United States intervened repeatedly during the early twenti-

eth century in an effort to reshape Nicaraguan politics, and was respon-

sible for both the creation of the National Guard and the selection of So-

moza to command it. Successive U.S. administrations of both parties

backed the Somoza dictatorship and armed the Guard, despite com-

plaints about both. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked “how he

could support that son of a bitch Somoza,” he is said to have replied: “So-

moza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” During the

Making Revolution I 545

Cold War, the Somozas’ anticommunism was sufficient to assure Wash-

ington’s support, and the Somozas played their U.S. cards with skill, cul-

tivating Washington politicians and envoys. North Americans made

large profits as Somoza business partners and the United States domi-

nated Nicaragua’s trade and finance. Small wonder that Nicaraguans

identified the United States with the Somoza regime and blamed Wash-

ington for their economic, social, and political ills.

In 1970, few countries in the region seemed as ripe for revolution as

Nicaragua, yet as unlikely to have one. The Sandinista National Liber-

ation Front (FSLN) was inspired by Sandino’s example, but it emulated

Castro’s. Founded by radicalized students in 1961, it was one of the less

successful of the many Latin American guerrilla groups that followed

Cuba’s lead during the 1960s. But new political and military strategies

and tactics-urban organization and peasant mobilization, broader social

alliances at home and support abroad, dramatic armed actions and pop-

ular insurrection-would bring the Sandinistas to power in 1979.

Equally important were the errors and unpopularity of the Somoza

regime. When an earthquake devastated Managua, the nation’s capital,

in 1972, Anastasio Somoza profited from the reconstruction, pocketed

relief funds, and used these monies to enter economic sectors previously

reserved for other members of the Nicaraguan elite. Somoza’s cynical

corruption in the face of national disaster embarrassed the educated mid-

dle class and alienated business elites whose interests were prejudiced by

his new ventures. His actions also scandalized the Catholic church: In

Nicaragua, unlike Mexico or Cuba, the Church would support the re-

bellion, culminating in 1979 in an unprecedented episcopal endorsement

of armed overthrow of the dictatorship.

In 1977, a group of twelve prominent professionals and clerics was

formed to bridge the gap between the Sandinistas and the elite opposi-

tion to Somoza led by Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, a charismatic publisher

and political reformer. Chamorro’s assassination in January 1978 re-

leased a national outrage that transcended class and partisan lines and set

the stage for the insurrection that followed.

546 / Americas

During the next eighteen months, strikes by dissident business elites

led by Alfonso Robelo and popular insurrections led by the Sandinistas

brought the Nicaraguan economy to a halt and the dictatorship to its

knees. In this revoluci6n de los muchachos, or Kids’ Revolution, sponta-

neous urban rebellion by young slum-dwellers was as important as

planned Sandinista offensives. When Somoza’s intransigence under-

mined U.S. efforts to arrange a transfer of power to Robelo’s moderates,

and when Latin American opposition in the OAS blocked Washington’s

proposal for hemispheric military intervention, the Sandinistas com-

pleted their defeat of Somoza’s National Guard, a personal army that dis-

integrated when the dictator fled the country in July 1979.

In Nicaragua, as in Cuba, the course of the rebellion determined the

outcome of the struggle for power that followed, establishing the San-

dinistas as both the people’s choice and the sole military force. Their

business allies were relegated to a minority position in the revolutionary

government headed by Sandinista commandante Daniel Ortega, whose

policies they were powerless to influence. In April 1980, Robelo and Vi-

oleta Barrios de Chamorro, Pedro Joaquin’s widow, resigned from the

revolutionary junta and joined an opposition that included business

elites and disillusioned Sandinistas and clerics.

As in Mexico and Cuba, the triumph of the Sandinista revolution

meant the transformation of rebels into rulers, the creation of a dominant

revolutionary party, and the extension of state power into new realms. A

literacy “crusade” based on the Cuban model made impressive gains

against great odds, and an increase in political participation through San-

dinista mass organizations occurred as well. Fidel Castro urged the San-

dinistas not to make the same mistakes he had made, and they tried to

shape their revolution in a distinct mold. Unlike Cuba, opposition parties

and newspapers were permitted and competitive elections were held, al-

though opponents complained of restrictions on the press and their po-

litical freedoms. Land reform, a central focus of Nicaragua’s revolution,

as it was in Mexico and Cuba, was an eclectic showcase for Sandinista

pragmatism, combining private ownership and state farms with an ex-

Making Revolution I 547

panding cooperative sector. Large landowners remained in control of

most of Nicaragua’s export crops, but the country’s capitalists lost their

political influence and complained that government policies prejudiced

their interests. They provided strong support for the internal political op-

position to the Sandinistas and to the U.S.-backed Contra guerrillas

whose efforts to overthrow them increasingly dominated Sandinista con-

cerns, along with a tightening U.S . economic squeeze with the same goal.

By January 1983, Health Minister Lea Guido was reduced to handing

out toys donated by U.S. solidarity groups to rural children in the north-

ern border zone, “because the policy of the U.S. government makes it

impossible to give them the medicines that they really need .” Eventually,

over 6o percent of the Sandinista government’s expenditures would be

devoted to defense. If the Nicaraguan revolution accomplished less than

its predecessors, it was in large part due to the need to devote a growing

portion of its more limited resources to fighting a Contra force of sixteen

thousand recruited, trained, armed, and directed by the United States. In

the end, perhaps the biggest achievement of the Sandinista revolution

was its survival for a decade in the face of unremitting U.S. hostility that

ranged from a virtual economic embargo to Washington’s largest and

most overt covert war.
In response, the Sandinistas moved closer to Moscow and radicalized

their revolution, accelerating their agrarian refopn to give Nicaragua’s

peasants something to fight for. In the cotton fields of Leon, along the

Pacific Coast, this strategy seemed a success. Looking at his cooperative’s

first cotton crop, Luis Mayorga talked in 1983 of how its previously land-

less members had gotten together at a meeting of the local Sandinista

peasant organization and decided to take advantage of the government’s

offer ofland by forming a cooperative, which also made them eligible for

government credits, an imported tractor, and technical assistance. A year

later, their cooperative was prospering and its members were talking

about adding livestock and building a school for their children. Many of

the peasants involved had been apolitical before, Mayorga recounted,

“but we are all Sandinistas now.”

548 / Americas

But not all Nicaraguan peasants reacted positively to Sandinista at-

tempts to organize them into cooperatives. Many were individualistic

farmers in less populated zones who resented such governmental inter-

ference. So did the Miskito Indians of the Atlantic Coast, who considered

themselves a nation apart from Spanish-speaking Nicaragua and de-

manded both political autonomy and control over the resources in the

third of Nicaraguan territory that they considered their homeland, de-

mands that the Sandinistas, with their nationalist ideology, were unwill-

ing to grant. It was in these regions that the Contras found significant

rural support and recruits.

In the short run, the result of the U .S. covert war was to stiffen San-

dinista resolve and enable them to rally support under the banner of na-

tionalism. Most Nicaraguans, with a new pride at their country’s ability

to stand up to the Colossus of the North, viewed the Contras as a con-

tinuation of the Somoza National Guard, complete with U.S. arms and

backing. Over time, however, the costs of the fratricidal conflict in blood

and treasure exhausted Sandinista resources and popularity.

Together with errors born of inexperience and ideology, bureaucratic

mismanagement and political infighting, a heavy debt burden inherited

from Somoza, and Moscow’s reluctance to assume the responsibility for

financing “another Cuba,” the Contra war and U .S. economic squeeze

restricted the Sandinistas to a struggle for survival that they won on the

battlefield but lost at the polls. In 1990, weary of sacrifice and disillu-

sioned with the Sandinistas’ inability to deliver on their promises of a

better life, Nicaraguans voted them out of office. They elected the op-

position leader Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, a conciliatory elite figure

whose family included both Sandinistas and Contras. She promised an

end to the fighting and the hope of U.S. aid in solving the country’s eco-

nomic problems. The Sandinista revolution became the first revolution

to be ended by ballots after taking power with bullets. In a way, that was

as much of a revolution as the Sandinistas’ partly successful efforts to

transform Nicaragua during a decade of revolutionary rule.

Yet, the fact that some Sandinista initiatives survived their ouster and

Making Revolution I 549

that the Sandinistas themselves remained a strong political force even in

2005-although as social democrats whose policies seem closer to capi-

talism than socialism-owed itself to a far quieter revolution in inter-

American relations, which deprived the United States of the Contra mil-

itary victory that Washington sought. It was a diplomatic revolution

begun by regional powers such as Venezuela and Mexico, but one in

which the tiny Central American nations themselves were the chief pro-

tagonists and the diminutive president of demilitarized Costa Rica was

the conquering hero.

A QUIET REVOLUTION

From the White House, Honduras and Costa Rica may have looked alike

in 1981, small Central American nations whose economies were de-

pendent upon U .S. aid and trade. Seen from Central America, they were

polar opposites, and so were their responses to U.S. efforts to make them

fronts for Washington’s war against the Sandinistas.

Honduras, a largely mestizo nation of four million, was the poorest

country in Central America. It was the last of the banana republics, with

a corrupt military, a weak political system, and a fear of its neighbors that

left it open to U.S . blandishments. “La Embajada,” as the U.S. embassy

in Tegucigalpa was known, soon became the regional command center

for Washington’s covert war, and Honduras’s rugged Nicaraguan border

area a sanctuary for the Contras.
Costa Rica, on Nicaragua’s southern frontier, was a country whose

two million people were largely of European descent, with the highest

levels of income, education, and equality in Central America. It was also

the one nation in the region with a strong democratic tradition, a wel-

fare state, and no army, the result of a post-World War II social demo-

cratic “revolution” led by Jose Figueres and his Liberation party. Con-

vinced that “war is not a natural human condition” and that “poverty and

armies” constituted the “biggest threats to democracy in Latin America,”

Figueres set out to eliminate both from Costa Rica. His success made

550 I Americas

Costa Rica an oasis of peace and democracy in a region notorious for vi-

olence and dictatorship.

Four decades later, falling coffee prices and rising welfare costs had

taken the shine off the Costa Rican model, but the “Ti cos’ ” pride in their

country and its democracy remained. Costa Rica had supported the San-

dinista struggle against Somoza, a longtime enemy, but turned sour on

Nicaragua ‘s revolution when it went beyond the bounds of their own so-

cial democracy-and the moderate stance of former Sandinistas and their

allies, men like Eden Pastora and Alfonso Robelo, who found a friendly

exile in Nicaragua’s southern neighbor. But Costa Ricans clung to their

neutrality in the middle of the Central American storm and resisted U.S.

pressures to remilitarize their country and turn it into the “southern

front” against the Sandinistas. Yet, without an army of their own the

Ticos were ill-prepared to police their frontiers. They had become a

combat zone between Sandinistas and Contras by 1986, when Oscar

Arias was elected president as the Liberation party standard-bearer, over

a more conservative candidate who favored an active Costa Rican in-

volvement in the U.S.-backed Contra war.

Arias was a political scientist with degrees from U.S. and British uni-

versities and a clear understanding of his country’s uniqueness-and vul-

nerability. Even before becoming president, he was convinced that being

dragged into the Contra war would be fatal for Costa Rica’s proud

democracy and possibly for its sovereignty as well. His inaugural address

stressed the need for “an alliance for liberty and democracy,” language

that he shared with U.S. president Ronald Reagan, but interpreted very

differently. Arias also proclaimed “nonintervention” to be a “sacred

right” of the nations of the Americas. 10

As president he moved decisively to reassert Costa Rican sovereignty

over its own territory, closing down a Contra airstrip and arresting the

reputed head of the CIA operation in his country. But Arias believed that

unless peace was restored in Nicaragua, Costa Rica’s neutrality and

democracy remained at risk and its economic prosperity a receding

dream. A December 1986 visit to Washington persuaded him that the

I
l
t

Making Revolution I 5 5 1

Reagan adininistration would fight until the last Central American to

roll back the Sandinista revolution. It was this conviction that brought

Arias to take the lead in creating a Central American peace process that

transformed even U.S. client states into protagonists of their own des-

tiny. It was the culmination of a long process of change in inter-
American relations.

Historically, the United States had been the ultimate arbiter of the re-

gion’s affairs. Washington had renounced the right of unilateral inter-

vention in 1936, but was instrumental in the creation of mechanisms for

multilateral intervention through the mutual defense provisions of the

Rio Pact of 1947 and the formation of the Organization of American

States (OAS) the following year. Under heavy U.S. pressure, the OAS in

1954 defined the political control of any American country by “the inter-

national Communist movement” as a threat to hemispheric peace that

justified collective intervention. The resolution was directed against

Guatemala, where a left-leaning coalition that included the small local

Communist party had undertaken a set of land and labor reforms preju-

dicial to important U.S. economic interests, and served to justify the

covert CIA intervention that overthrew the Arbenz government later that

year. Similar considerations would be invoked to justify both the OAS’s

expulsion of an avowedly Communist Cuba in 1962, and the 1965 U.S.

intervention in the Dominican Republic to forestall a popular insurrec-

tion aimed at restoring the ousted constitutional president, reformer Juan

Bosch, where the alleged Communist threat was difficult to demonstrate.

During the two decades that followed World War II, the OAS served to

legitimate a U.S. policy of intervening to contain or reverse perceived rev-

olutionary threats in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Fourteen years would pass before another threat of revolution in the

U.S. sphere-in Nicaragua-would lead Washington to turn to the OAS

once again to rubber-stamp U.S. intervention. In 1979, however, the

OAS rejected Washington’s appeal to intervene in Nicaragua. Clearly,

much had changed in the interim.

The economic bases of U.S. hegemony had weakened, as Latin Amer-

S S 2 / Americas

ican nations industrialized and Japanese and European rivals cut into the

U.S. share of the region’s trade and investment, and the capacity of Latin

American countries for autonomous action had increased. In addition,

the moral authority of the United States had declined with its covert war

against the democratically elected Allende government and U .S. support

of military regimes in the region. The Carter administration had won

credit for its human rights stand, but its insensitivity to Latin America’s

economic aspirations and its vacillating Nicaragua policy robbed its

OAS initiative of credibility.

Latin American perceptions of the threat of regional revolution were

also different in 1979 than in the 1960s. Fears that the Cuban revolution

would sweep over the region had faded, and few governments in the OAS

saw a Sandinista Nicaragua as posing a threat of regional revolution,

while many saw the Nicaraguan revolution as a justified response to

decades of oppressive dictatorship and U.S. domination. In opposing

U .S. requests for an OAS “peacekeeping force” in Nicaragua, moreover,

Latin American nations were expressing their defense of national self-

determination against the Colossus of the North. As a consequence,

when the Carter administration asked the OAS to sanction the creation

of a peacekeeping force, it was decisively defeated. For the first time in

history, the OAS had served to block a U .S. intervention, not to legiti-

mate one. The Nicaraguan revolution not only challenged U.S . hege-

mony in its own backyard; it also provided an opportunity for other

American republics to assert their autonomy.

In the wake of the U .S. defeat in the OAS, Washington discounted it

as a policy instrument and looked instead to more malleable subregional

groupings. In 1983 , when an internecine struggle in Grenada provided

an excuse for the United States to intervene and put an end to that is-

land’s socialist revolution, the Reagan administration turned not to the

OAS, but to an association of eastern Caribbean ministates for endorse-

ment. Similar considerations governed U.S. strategy in Central America,

where Washington bypassed the OAS and presented the other Central

American states as the regional judge of any Nicaraguan peace accord. It

Making Revolution I S S 3

was a strategy that reflected U .S. distrust of the Latin American major-

ity in the OAS and dismay at the emergence in 1982 of informal but

highly visible Latin American efforts to broker a compromise peace

agreement that would deprive the U.S.-backed Contra war of legiti-

macy-and leave the Sandinistas in power.

Beginning in 1982, the Contadora group-Colombia, Mexico, Panama,

and Venezuela—of regional powers pressed for a negotiated solution to the

linked Central American conflicts, an approach which Washington could

not openly oppose. Instead, it used its influence with Central American

client states such as Honduras and El Salvador to block successive Conta-

dora initiatives. In 1986, the Contadora group was strengthened by the cre-

ation of a South American support group, but continued U.S. opposition

stalemated their efforts to broker a peace. Still, a meeting of the region’s for-

eign ministers reaffirmed that the overwhelming majority of Latin Amer-

ican nations opposed U.S. intervention and favored a negotiated settlement.

Oscar Arias built on these Latin American initiatives, but launched his

own Central American peace plan, in which its leaders would themselves

resolve the conflicts plaguing their region through a linked process of ne-

gotiations and elections. “Only democracy,” he affirmed, “can end wars

between brothers.” 11 Washington still wanted a military victory in

Nicaragua, not a negotiated settlement that left the Sandinistas super-

vising their own elections, and Reagan deemed the Arias plan to be “fa-

tally flawed.” 12 But his ability to block Arias was now weakened by the

Iran-Contra scandal and the congressional opposition to continued

funding of the Contras that had provoked Colonel Oliver North’s illegal

efforts to secure Asian financing for the U.S. covert war against the San-

dinistas. When the Costa Rican president persuaded his fellow Central

American heads of state-including Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega-that

peace and elections were in their best interests, the road was open to the

Esquipulas accords of August 1987, which provided for a peace process

centered around negotiated settlements of the region’s conflicts and re-

spect for democracy and human rights, including amnesties for insur-

gents and new elections in which all parties could participate.

554 I Americas

It was with justice that Oscar Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1987, and it was significant that it was a Central American-not

a United States-initiative that ended Nicaragua’s long and bitter civil

war. “Let Central Americans decide the future of Central America,” Arias

used his Nobel award ceremony to tell the United States, urging it to

“support the efforts for peace instead of the forces of war in our region.”

The goal, he stressed, was not “peace alone” but “peace and democracy,

together, indivisible, an end to the shedding ofhuman blood, which is in-

separable from an end to the suppression of human rights.” 13 Although

Washington remained fixated on Nicaragua until the Sandinista defeat in

February 1990, Arias’s words seemed equally applicable to El Salvador,

where a revolution of similar longevity was also entering its final phases,

although in radically different circumstances.

WAR WITHOUT END

“In the case of El Salvador, ideology was not the principal generator of

armed conflict,” argued Ruben Zamora, a democratic reformer with a de-

gree in political science and two decades’ experience of Salvadoran pol-

itics. “Here the civil war began because there was no political space. First

we tried the electoral route, but all the elections were marred by fraud

and repression. We also tried the so-called extra-parliamentary politics

route of demonstrations. But the response to these street demonstrations

was to shoot people, and each demonstration became a massacre,” he re-

counted. “People like myself who were opposed to armed struggle even

tried something that was against our principles-an alliance with the mil-

itary-participating in the ’79 junta with the young officers. But all those

roads were systematically blocked and closed.” The other cause of the

Salvadoran conflict, he asserted, was “the problem of social injustice. In

economic and social terms, El Salvador may be the most polarized coun-

try in Latin America.” This combination of “great polarization and con-

stant repression,” concluded Zamora, was “the recipe for civil war.”

It was a conflict of incredible ferocity, which claimed some seventy-

Making Revolution I 555

five thousand lives and one million displaced persons and lasted for

twelve years. The 1980s may have been a decade of revolutionary change

in Nicaragua, but for revolutionaries in nearby El Salvador, they were

years of endless war.

El Salvador has the second smallest territory in Central America, but

the region’s second largest population. In 1979, its high population den-

sity was compounded by an unequal distribution of land that gave 2 per-

cent of its people 60 percent of its land, and left hundreds of thousands

with no land at all. Many eked out a living as tenants or migrant labor-

ers; others crossed into Honduras in search of land or a living; still oth-

ers swelled the slums of San Salvador and sought urban jobs.

It was the coffee boom of 1870-1930 that prompted this concentra-

tion of landholdings and people. During this era, an entrepreneurial elite

composed of ladino landowners and foreign merchants-the so-called

“fourteen families,” although their number was closer to two hundred-

coalesced, and a polarized class structure emerged, along with Central

America’s most radical labor movement and most dynamic Communist

party.

The Depression of the 1930s brought the coffee boom to an end,

along with the oligarchic democracy that had given El Salvador political

stability during the preceding decades. In 1932, a rural rebellion was or-

ganized by the Communists, led by Farabundo Marti, whose memory

and cause would be invoked by the rebels of the 1980s, who named their

“national liberation front” the FMLN in his honor. The revolt was

crushed by the army, which massacred thousands of peasants and Indi-

ans, a model of social control that has appealed to sectors of the Sal-

vadoran elite and military ever since: One of the most notorious death

squads of the 1980s was named after the general who ordered the mas-

sacre. In El Salvador, both sides saw the civil war of the 1980s as the con-

tinuation of a conflict that stretched back to the 1930s.

For most of the next half century, the military ruled El Salvador in

close alliance with the country’s elite, which expanded its activities from

coffee to cotton after World War II and then into industry with the for-

5 56 I Americas

mation of the Central American Common Market in 1960. This eco-

nomic growth, however, did little to ameliorate the poverty in which

most Salvadorans lived, or modify the rigid class structure into which the

country was divided. “The fourteen families were practically the owners

of El Salvador,” emphasized peasant leader Miguel Aleman, “the owners

of the governments, of all the money and all the production. This is what

generated great poverty in the middle of great wealth in our country, and

that has been the fundamental problem of us peasants, who have been de-

nied education, health, housing, and the respect that we deserve as

human beings.” Efforts at reform, even when led by Christian Democ-

ratic moderates, were systematically repressed by the military in the

name of anticommunism, while the United States ignored these viola-

tions of human rights.

In El Salvador there was no Somoza against whom a coalition that

crossed class lines could unite. Instead, there was the rigidity of a society

divided by class, whose inequalities were sustained by an intransigent

elite and a repressive military. As a result, Salvador’s civil war would be a

class war, waged with a brutality that reflected the country’s social ten-

sions-and political polarization.

In 1972, reformers Jose Napoleon Duarte and Guillermo Ungo were

running mates on a Christian Democrat-Social Democrat reform ticket

that was winning decisively until the military intervened to stop their

electoral triumph. When Duarte protested, he was jailed, tortured, and

sent into exile, along with Ungo. A decade later, Duarte would rule El

Salvador in alliance with its armed forces, while Ungo headed the De-

mocratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) in alliance with leftist guerrillas.

During the 1970s, five revolutionary movements were formed, re-

flecting a broad spectrum of leftist views, from orthodox Communists

and Trotskyists to those influenced by liberation theology or Castro’s

Cuba. They mobilized peasants and urban workers into popular organ-

izations of increasing strength in the face of a fierce repression that pre-

vented them from opening up the political system before 1979.

The Sandinista victory in nearby Nicaragua in July of that year altered

f

Making Revolution I 5 5 7

Salvadoran politics as well. In its wake, a Washington that had taken

Central America for granted worried that it was ripe for revolution. El

Salvador’s repressive politics and social inequities marked it as a target of

opportunity for leftist revolutionaries, and the United States believed

that it was next on their list. These concerns led the Carter administra-

tion to back the ouster of the hardline president, General Carlos

Romero, in October 1979 by a group of reforming younger officers anx-

ious to avoid Somoza’s fate, and the formation of a civil-military junta

pledged to agrarian, banking, and political reforms. At bottom, Wash-

ington opted to support reform from above out of fear of revolution from

below.

But the political space created by the junta was soon filled by leftist

popular organizations, which jammed the streets of the capital with tens

of thousands of demonstrators. The reaction of Washington was to shift

its support to the more conservative military officers in the governing

junta and to the right-wing Christian Democrats under Duarte. The re-

sponse of the Salvadoran elite and their security forces and death squads

was murder: the cold-blooded massacre of demonstrators, the killing of

thousands suspected of leftist sympathies, and the assassination of their

civil and political leaders. Among the most prominent victims were San

Salvador Archbishop Oscar Romero, an advocate for the poor and

human rights who was assassinated after saying mass, and Ruben

Zamora’s brother Mario, a Christian Democrat who as Attorney General

for the Poor in the new government sought to promote social reform.

Increasingly, the reformers-who united in April 1980 to form the

FDR, which allied itself with the FMLN the following year-were

forced underground by an unremitting repression that made it impossi-

ble to engage in politics openly in the cities of El Salvador. By 1981, the

Salvadoran left had come to the conclusion that armed struggle was their

only option and that the countryside was their best bet. The repressive

response of an intransigent elite had transformed reformers into revolu-

tionaries and political cadres into guerrillas. “We were left with only one

choice,” explained Ruben Zamora, who had been the junta’s civilian chief

558 / Americas

of staff, “go home and cry–or armed struggle.” Zamora, who left the

Christian Democrats out of disillusionment, became the FDR’s chief

spokesperson abroad, but many in the Salvadoran left exchanged the city

streets for the country’s jungle-covered mountains and the mass meeting

for the guerrilla ambush. By 1981, the FMLN felt strong enough to call

for a “final offensive” that they believed would bring them to power be-

fore Ronald Reagan became U.S. president on January 20.

Reagan had campaigned on a platform blaming the advance of “Com-

munist” revolution in Central America on the liberal policies of the

Carter administration, and advocating an interventionist U.S. policy that

would roll back the revolutionary tide in El Salvador and Nicaragua be-

fore it reached the borders of the United States. “The government of El

Salvador,” asserted Reagan, “is on the front line in a battle that is really

aimed at the very heart of the Western Hemisphere, and eventually us.” 14

Top Reagan officials also saw El Salvador as the place to put an end to

the “Vietnam syndrome” by demonstrating that the United States could

defeat leftist guerrillas at an acceptable cost. The Salvadoran army halted

the FMLN “final offensive,” and during the decade that followed, over

five billion dollars in U.S. aid allowed the armed forces to modernize

their weapons and tactics and quadruple in size. Washington was less suc-

cessful in getting them to change their repressive ways.

With a rightist government in Washington willing to ignore abuses in

El Salvador in its war against communism, violations of human rights mul-

tiplied. Rightist leader Roberto D’ Aubuisson-whom U.S. Ambassador

Robert White held responsible for the assassination of Archbishop

Romero-vowed to stop communism in El Salvador no matter what the

cost in lives, and the nation’s security forces seemed to take the former mil-

itary officer at his word. North Americans were shocked by the coldblooded

murder of four U.S. women missionaries one month after Reagan’s election

and angered at the inability or unwillingness of the Salvadoran military to

bring their killers to justice. But viewed from El Salvador, the U.S. mis-

sionaries were just four of the thousands of victims of its bitter civil war,

most of whom were civilians, many of them women and children.

r
r

Making Revolution I 559

The same was true of two U.S. agrarian reform advisers shot in San

Salvador a fortnight before Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, whose fate

symbolized that of the land reform they had promoted. In the Reagan

years, agrarian reform made little progress in the face of the fierce op-

position of rightist landowners like Oscar Calvo, who considered the

U.S. advisers “socialists” and the agrarian reform “robbery,” which ille-

gally “confiscated” lands “that ought to be in the hands of those who

know how to make them produce,” one of “the three reforms” -together

with the nationalization of banking and foreign trade-“that destroyed

the Salvadoran economy.” Landowners backed D’Aubuisson, and their

death squads joined the security forces in terrorizing the countryside,

making membership in an agrarian reform cooperative hazardous and

election as a peasant leader a death sentence.

The exception was in the territories controlled by the FMLN, where

“peasants supported the FMLN’s struggle as just and necessary,” ac-

cording to Miguel Aleman, “because there was no other way to solve the

social problem.” By 1983, the FMLN had consolidated strongholds in El

Salvador’s mountainous northern regions and begun to expand its area of

influence toward the coast. As the combatants on both sides grew in

numbers and their weapons in firepower, the fighting escalated. The Sal-

vadoran military pursued a Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, complete

with U.S. helicopters and advisers. The guerrillas countered with a “war

of movement” and attacks on provincial towns and military barracks. Al-

though the tide of battle seesawed throughout the decade, by late 1989-

when a powerful FMLN offensive in the nation’s capital shocked San Sal-

vador but failed to ignite a popular insurrection-it was clear that neither

side could win El Salvador’s endless war. It was a realization that led both

government and guerrillas to the peace table called for by the Esquipu-

las accords of 1987.

By 1990, much else had changed as well, both in El Salvador and in

the world outside. By then, the Salvadoran right, united in the National

Republican Alliance (ARENA) founded by D’Aubuisson, had won polit-

ical power by defeating the Christian Democrats in both presidential and

560 I Americas

legislative elections, converting many in its ranks to the gospel of democ-

racy now being preached by Washington. President Alfredo Cristiani,

moreover, represented the country’s business elites, who were convinced

that El Salvador’s crippled economy could not be cured so long as the

fighting continued, and that the war could not be won on the battlefield.

The United States was also growing weary of El Salvador’s interminable

war and the U.S. Congress was increasingly reluctant to bankroll a Sal-

vadoran military whose continued violations of human rights were un-

derscored by the murder of six Jesuit priests in November 1989.

There was also less reason for Washington to support a costly war in

El Salvador. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the ac-

celerating disintegration of the Soviet Union heralded the end of the

Cold War that had framed U .S. policy toward El Salvador. The Sandin-

ista defeat at the polls meant that there was no longer a credible revolu-

tionary threat in Central America and persuaded many in Washington

that ballots-not bullets-were the best way to counter leftist advances.

Within this context, the United States was willing to accept the princi-

ple of a negotiated settlement in El Salvador.

By then, moreover, the Salvadoran left had also shifted its stance. The

civilian reformers of the FDR, such as Ruben Zamora, had always been

in favor of a negotiated settlement, and in 1987 had formed the Demo-

cratic Convergence to participate in elections “and plant the idea of a po-

litical solution.” By January 1990, the revolutionary movements that

formed the FMLN had come to a similar conclusion, after an internal de-

bate over the implications of changes in the “socialist world” for El Sal-

vador’s revolution between Marxist-Leninists, who believed in a broad-

based revolution led by a political vanguard that would transform their

society from above, and less ideological leftists, who saw force as a way

of opening up the political space for popular movements to change Sal-

vadoran society from within. The debate was won by the more pragmatic

faction headed by Joaquin Villalobos, commander of the People’s Revo-

lutionary Army (ERP), militarily the strongest of the FMLN’s five guer-

rilla movements. Villalobos, a brilliant if ruthless tactician with a dis-

Making Revolution I 561

arming baby face, had been influenced by liberation theology as an eco-

nomics student at university and contrasted his own views with “the dog-

matic ideological elements who dominated the FMLN when it started.”

The ERP, he stressed, had been founded by radicalized “university stu-

dents and Christian groups” who had never been Communists, and in-

fluenced by the Sandinistas, with their “open model of revolution.”

The Sandinista electoral defeat in February 1990 was a shock to the

FMLN, increasing their sense of isolation-and bringing home the im-

permanence of military victory. Latin American leaders in Mexico and

elsewhere urged the FMLN to seek a political settlement. President

Cristiani signaled the ARENA government’s readiness to negotiate when

he “offered a process of dialogue with clear objectives, such as to promote

democracy and respect for human rights and reconciliation within Sal-

vadoran society, and then to put an end to the conflict itself,” asserted

Oscar Santa Marfa, the president’s cabinet chief. The FMLN accepted
Cristiani’s offer.

After two years of difficult negotiations between deadly enemies who

had little reason to trust each other, the United Nations helped broker

the accord signed at the beginning of 1992 . It was a political compromise

that allowed both sides to claim victory, while leaving the future in doubt.

The FMLN secured a promise that human rights and the land reform

carried out in its areas of influence would be respected, but few concrete

commitments. It also won agreement on proposals for “purifying” a re-

duced armed forces, for a new police force under civilian control into

which its fighters could be integrated, and for democratic reforms that

might open up the political system and give the left a better chance of

winning power through elections. In return, the government got the

FMLN to agree to end the twelve-year insurgency, to recognize its le-
gitimacy, and to accept its constitution.

For Santa Marfa, the minister closest to President Cristiani, this

meant that “the FMLN would now submit itself to the democratic sys-

tem” and transform itself from “a guerrilla force into a political force.”

For Ruben Zamora, the significance of the accords was that “for the first

562 I Americas

time since 1930 there is a real chance to demilitarize and democratize the

country.” On February 1, 1992, FMLN guerrillas joined their support-

ers in a peace celebration in the main square of San Salvador. This was

the revolutionary left’s first public demonstration in the country’s capi-

tal in more than a decade. “When we went into the plaza, it was like a tri-

umph,” one guerrilla fighter affirmed. For the FMLN, claimed Villalo-

bos, “this is a revolution.”

Not all Salvadorans were as pleased with the peace accords or as sat-

isfied with their outcome. Ultrarightists like Oscar Calvo viewed the ac-

cords as the equivalent of “a pact between the police and a thief,” which

robbed the government of its “legitimacy” and “authority, … lowering

it to the level of the guerrillas .. . the new Attilas,” whom the government

had now allowed to shoot their way into the parliament. Landowners like

himself were organizing to oppose the accords, he claimed, because “our

governments have been too soft.”

Peasant leaders like Miguel Aleman were supportive of the peace

process in principle, but remained skeptical of them in practice. For him,

the accords had changed little: “The shooting war may have ended, but

in a nation where eighty percent of the population is now below the

poverty line, the war of hunger, misery and exploitation continues,” he

asserted. In the countryside, “the only change was that with the ceasefire
there are no longer military operations and forced recruitment. But the

government has still not given the peasants so much as a flea! So the fruits

of the accords have been minimal.”

In San Salvador, a shopkeeper in a food cooperative was also skeptical.
He talked about continued insecurity and his “fear of speaking openly . . . .

There has been so much blood spilled, but the people are even poorer

than before,” he lamented. “The people have hope with the peace process,

but we still have the same problems and the same fear,” he stressed. “This

could be an even more dangerous time bomb than before.”

Clearly, the peace accords had not resolved El Salvador’s social in-

equities or transformed its basic institutions. “All we have done,” argued

Ruben Zamora, “is bought some time.”

Making Revolution / 563

. . As the ~ew century began, El Salvador’s social and economic inequal-
1t1es remamed, but the peace held and political conflict was centered

around election-not military-campaigns. Zamora finished second as

the left’s candidate in the 1994 presidential elections, and leftist candi-

dates gained ground in congressional and local elections during the

decade that followed. But divisions within the left and the insistence of

aging FMLN leaders on being the candidate allowed the right to win

presidential elections in 1999 and 2004. Yet the FMLN has remained the

principal political opposition force, with democratic control of many of

the municipalities it once contested by force and strength in the con-

gress. It was only one good candidate away from winning the presidency.

The democratic political space whose absence had led the FMLN to take
up arms in the 1980s was now theirs to contest.

Equally important, both sides in the civil war now regarded democ-

racy as an important end in itself. “The principal problem is not to fight

to take power,” stressed FMLN military chief Villalobos, “but to fight for

the structural changes that establish new rules of the game.” On the other

~ide, army general Ernesto Vargas affirmed that “the democratic system

1s the best one for this society-and that the authoritarianism within our
society has to totally disappear.”

Only time will tell whether this new commitment to democracy will

last and whether the Salvadoran left can secure through the ballot box the

revolutionary changes that they failed to win on the battlefield. As a new

century dawned, what was clear was that one phase of their struggle was
over and a new one had begun.

B~ 2_005, with the Soviet bloc consigned to the dustbin of history, the

Sandinistas transformed into a parliamentary opposition, the Salvadoran

civil war ending in a negotiated settlement, and most of the once revo-

lutionary left in South America sounding like social democrats, the cycle

of rev~lution in Latin America and the Caribbean that had begun in

Cuba m 1 959 was corning to an end. It was an issue with which the
Cubans themselves were trying to grapple. “It may be that a small cycle

of revolution is ending, but that had happened before, with the death of

564 / Americas

Che Guevara, only for a new cycle to start with the Sandinistas,” argued

Luis Suarez, a leading Cuban analyst of the region’s revolutionary move-

ments. “So long as the conditions that require revolution-poverty, op-

pression, exploitation, inequality, injustice-exist, revolutionaries will

appear to challenge them. Those conditions are more acute in most of

Latin America and the Caribbean now than a decade ago,” he claimed,

“and today’s neoliberal policies will make them even worse.”

In Peru, Hernando de Soto, a noted advocate of free market policies,

agreed, because neoliberal policies “created opportunities for the upper

crust of the population-probably no more than ten to twenty percent-

but the situation remains the same for the lower eighty to ninety per-

cent.” For Peru’s Shining Path, it was a recipe for revolution.

PERU’S SHINING PATH

“We are in the decade of triumph of ‘People’s War’ in Peru,” a diminu-

tive guerrilla affirmed in April 1992, with a conviction that belied her im-

prisonment in a Lima cellblock. 15 In the men’s part of the prison, her

comrades were equally emphatic. The crisis of Communism in other

parts of the world did not deter them from insisting that “We will take

power in the entire country this decade and then continue the socialist

revolution with successive cultural revolutions to reach communism,

which is the goal of all humanity.” 16

The cycle of socialist revolution might be coming to a close in Cen-

tral America, but in Peru, the heartland of the ancient Inca empire, a tiny

provincial faction of a small Maoist party had transformed itself into the

biggest revolutionary threat in the Americas. By 1992, Sendero Lumi-

noso, the Shining Path, was making front pages around the globe with

its bombing campaign in the country’s capital and alleged control of the

world’s largest coca-growing region. ·

Elsewhere, Sendero might be a new headline, but in Peru it was an old

story. OnJune 24, 1969, the “revolutionary” military regime of General

Juan Velasco proclaimed a sweeping land reform and the transformation

Making Revolution I 565

of “Indians” into “peasants.” In the national furor that followed, few in

Peru noticed that three days before in the departmental capital of Ay-

acucho, peasants, high school students, and shantytown dwellers had

protested government plans to end free education in a militant demon-

stration that left at least four dead and thirty-seven arrested. Among the

detained was Abimael Guzman, a philosophy teacher from Ayacucho’s

University of Huamanga. A few months later, Guzman formed his own

“Communist Party of Peru,” better known as “the Shining Path,” which

would transform these young demonstrators into fanatical soldiers of a
millenarian revolution.

The Shining Path-the name refers to Jose Carlos Mariategui’s term

for the proletariat’s role in the Communist revolution-emerged out of

successive splits in the Peruvian Communist party that Mariategui

founded in 192 8 that produced several Maoist factions during the 1960s.

Guzman was trained in Mao’s China during its radical 1960s Cultural

Revolution, an experience decisive in his political formation. He would

remain an unrepentant Maoist long after Maoism had lost power in
China itself.

By 1970, Guzman had lost the battle for national leadership of Peru’s

Maoist party but had consolidated control over its organization in high-

land Ayacucho, one of Peru’s poorest and most neglected departments. It

was also a region whose society and values were shaped in a hierarchical

and authoritarian mold by centuries of semi-feudal relations. “Ayacucho,”

Guzman would later affirm, “helped me understand the peasantry.” 17

The social conflict out of which Sendero emerged in Ayacucho was

not over land-which the economic decline of the region’s elite and the

Guevarist guerrillas of the mid-196os had helped peasants acquire by

purchase or seizure-but over access to freeeducation. In this struggle,

the Indian peasantry and rural migrants to the shantytowns of the re-

gion’s capital were often led by mestizo advisers, provincial intellectuals

of lower middle class origin resentful of their own exclusion from power
by the creole elite.

One was Abimael Guzman, who began to accumulate power within

566 I Americas

the self-governing provincial university as its personnel chief. By 1970,

Guzman and his comrades controlled the university’s basic education

curriculum. They transformed it into a course of indoctrination in their

party’s Maoist ideology and a recruiting ground for its cadres among ~e

new generation of students from rural communities who entered the uru-

versity in growing numbers after 1969. After graduation, these cadres re-

turned to their rural communities as teachers and recruited their own

students for Sendero’s revolutionary cause. This stress on hierarchical

organization, ideological indoctrination, and the recruitment of edu-

cated mestizo youth as cadres shaped the Shining Path.

When Sendero was bested in the competition for control of Ayacu-

cho’s mass organizations and university by political rivals-many of

them the heirs of the revolutionary New Left of the 196os., who became

leaders of the new social movements of the 1970s and would form the

United Left of the 198os-it withdrew into itself, stressing internal co-

hesion and ideological purity. Sendero defined itself not as a mass party,

but as a revolutionary vanguard for the “masses,” who, Guzman stressed,
“have to be taught through overwhelming actions so that ideas can be

pounded into them.” 18

With the defeat of Maoism in China in 1976, Sendero claimed its

mantle and Guzman-who took the nom-de-guerre “President Gon-

zalo” -was transformed into “the fourth sword of Marxism,” the succes-

sor to Marx, Lenin and Mao, with a cult of personality to match. His

“Gonzalo-Thought”-“the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism

to our concrete conditions”-became increasingly schematic and mil-

lenarian, defining Communism as “the society of ‘great harmony’ .. . to-

ward which 1 5 billion years of matter in motion … has necessarily and

uncontainably been heading.” 19 Sendero projected itself as the leader of

global revolution in an age of violence that would culminate in “world-

wide People’s War.”20

On the eve of the 1980 elections that signalled Peru’s restoration of

democracy after twelve years of military rule, Guzman went under-

ground and launched his “People’s War.” During the decade that fol-

I
(

Making Revolutim I 567

lowed, Sendero grew into a revolutionary movement that dominated

much of Peru’s Andean highlands and extended its reach to the coca-

producing valleys above the Amazon rainforest and the coastal shanty-

towns of Lima.

Part of the explanation for Sendero’s surprising success was its stress

on efficient organization and the careful recruitment and indoctrination

of disciplined young cadres, who accepted Guzman’s simplified view of

Peru’s complex realities as “scientific” truth and were totally dedicated to

Sendero’s cause, vowing not only to die for it, but also to kill for it-pay-

ing what Guzman called “the quota of blood” needed to win his revolu-

tion. The unquestioning obedience and self-sacrifice of his young fol-

lowers was one of Sendero’s greatest sources of strength.

For the most part, however, Sendero’s success reflected Peru’s failures,

as well as the Shining Path’s capacity to understand and exploit the fault-

lines within Andean society. Particularly important was Sendero’s ability

to manipulate the resentments and aspirations of Peru’s poor, largely In-

dian majority.

Although the military “revolution” led by General Juan Velasco pro-

claimed a sweeping agrarian reform in 1969, its implementation was un-

even, its administration was authoritarian, and it failed to solve the prob-

lem oflandlessness in the highlands or to resolve the land claims of many

indigenous communities. During the decade that followed the restora-

tion of democracy, moreover, much of the land belonging to the agrar-

ian reform cooperatives was reprivatized.

In areas where the military’s agrarian reform had not restored lands

taken from indigenous communities in the past or where the breakup of

cooperatives had created new resentments, Sendero organized land in-

vasions to win the local peasantry to its cause. But even within indigenous

communities where private landholdings had generated lesser inequali-

ties, Sendero attacked “the landlords” and appealed to the poor peasants

who owned no land and had to work the fields and tend the flocks of their

richer neighbors. Aided by its informants within rural communities,

Sendero also utilized ancient rivalries between villages and valleys and

568 I Americas

old enmities within rural communities to establish a base and undermine

local leaders.

In regions where land was not an issue, as in its original base in Ay-

acucho, Sendero focused instead on the failure of the Peruvian state to

deliver social services such as education, or to remedy the poverty of the

local population. In striking this note, it played on the longstanding dis-

satisfaction of highland regions with their neglect by the governments in

Lima. Throughout the Peruvian Sierra, moreover, Sendero was able to

· take advantage of what U .S. Ambassador Anthony Quainton called “the

sense of profound cultural grievance in the Indian peoples of the high-

lands.”21 In a region that the creole elite still refers to as la mancha india,

the Indian Stain, racism is pervasive-and resented. An unequal social hi-

erarchy based upon color and ethnicity was a colonial legacy reinforced

after independence by Peru’s creole elites and sustained by Velasco ‘s

agrarian reform administrators . Sendero’s rigidly Maoist ideology, with

its stress on class, left little room for ethnic nationalism, and its own hi-

erarchy-with light-skinned leaders, mestiz o cadres, and dark-skinned

soldiers-replicated Peru’s. But Sendero cadres appealed to the Indians

of the highlands in Quechua and exploited their resentment at centuries

of discrimination, oppression, and neglect by the country’s creole elites

and mestizo middlemen. Moreover, there was sufficient ambiguity in its

critiques for alienated Indians to imagine that Sendero might offer Peru

policies “that would have its roots in our ancestors,” as one Indian mi-

grant put it. 22

In extending its influence to zones that were both distant and different

from its original highland base, Sendero also demonstrated a political

pragmatism that softened its ideological rigidity. In the Huallaga Valley,

a zone of recent colonization above the Amazon rain forest in northern

Peru that became the world’s largest producer of coca leaves, Sendero

dropped its moralistic anti-drug stance to offer protection to local grow-

ers against both the Colombian cocaine cartels and the corrupt Peruvian

military and U.S. drug agents sent to combat the illegal narcotics traffic.

In return, the Shining Path received over $2 50 million in “taxes.”

Making Revolution I 569

Sendero itself attributed its advances to “the support of the masses.”

Sendero’s opponents, who ranged from right to left, ascribed them to the

Shining Path’s “terrorism,” the “revolutionary violence” that Abimael

Guzman defended as “a universal law” and glorified as “the river of

blood” across which he would lead Peru’s people to the Maoist promised

land. Sendero used violence as both a political strategy and a military tac-

tic. Where its appeals proved unpersuasive and rural communities re-

mained loyal to political rivals or their own autonomy, Sendero re-

sponded with an intimidation that ranged from peasant massacres to the

“selective liquidation” of local leaders-whether they were associated

with the government, other leftist parties, or the rotational grassroots

democracy that has ruled Andean communities for centuries.

The response of Peru’s civilian governments to Sendero’s challenge to

their authority was to militarize the affected regions, declaring a state of

emergency and bringing in the armed forces to conduct a counter-

insurgency campaign. But the military shared the racism of Peru’s elites

and its massacres, disappearances, and strip searches claimed many in-

nocent Indian victims. In classic guerrilla fashion, Sendero provoked a

governmental repression that proved its political points and created the

polarized situation it sought. Youths whose families had suffered military

abuses were ripe for recruitment by the Shining Path.

Moreover, the government security forces sent to combat Sendero

often attacked the leftist grassroots organizations best able to accomplish

that task. The result was that Sendero emerged as the only alternative to

a repressive and racist military, explained Juan Rojas, a national peasant

leader opposed to Sendero, and was able to appear as the “protector of

the people against the abuses of the soldiers.”

Caught in a crossfire between repressive state security forces and a

ruthless revolutionary army, many in the highlands voted with their feet.

Entire areas of rural Ayacucho were virtually depopulated. It was an ex-

odus of desperate refugees fleeing the violence that had killed their kin

and destroyed their communities, “leaving [behind] only orphaned chil-

dren and the aged who have no relatives left.”23 By 1992, some 250,000

5 70 I Americas

Peruvians had fled their rural homes for the comparative safety of garri-

son towns or coastal cities. By then, the conflict had followed them, as the

Shining Path expanded its operations in Lima.

Although Sendero had long had a presence in Lima, announced by pe-

riodic electricity blackouts or other “propaganda in action,” its initial

focus was on recruiting and training cadres, with a stress on poor students

similar to its initial recruits in Ayacucho. San Marcos, Peru’s oldest uni-

versity, was one target; Lima’s teachers college, whose graduates were

sent to staff the new schools created in its rapidly expanding shanty-

towns, was another.

During the late 1980s, Sendero began to expand its bases from the rural

communities and provincial towns of the highlands to the Lima shanty-

towns peopled by migrants from those provincial communities and towns.

Sendero did not participate in the leftist-led social movements that made

these shantytowns bastions of grassroots democracy, preferring “generated

organisms” subservient to party orders. But Sendero penetrated neigh-

borhood assemblies, intimidated opponents, and established its “People’s

Committees” and web of informants. When grassroots leaders blocked its

path to power, Sendero assassinated the most famous, Maria Elena Moy-

ano, the “Mother Courage” of Lima’s slums, as a warning to the rest.

Sendero’s advance was facilitated by the failures of Peru’s democratic

political system, the collapse of its economy and the shrinking power of

its state. The restoration of democracy in 1980 raised popular expecta-

tions that Peru’s civilian leaders were unable to fulfill. They inherited a

heavy foreign debt burden from the military regime, which was soon

compounded by rising international interest rates and a severe global re-

cession. Populist policies and a debt default deepened the crisis, which

culminated in the collapse of the economy under President Alan Garcia

(1985-90), in which inflation soared to an incredible 3500 percent, while

the economy contracted and living standards plunged.

To the failure of Peru’s elected governments was added the failings of

Sendero’s rivals within the democratic left. The left had begun the 1980s

Making Revolution I 571

with optimism as leaders of the new social movements-from unions to

women’s groups-that played a prominent role in the restoration of

democracy. But the “United Left” ended the decade in disarray, a med-

ley of squabbling personalist parties, with no answers to Peru’s deepen-

ing crisis and with declining popular support. By 1990, Peruvians were

disillusioned with the entire spectrum of parties and politicians, whom

they regarded as both corrupt and incompetent.

This anti-party sentiment enabled Alberto Fujimori, a political novice

without strong party backing or a detailed program, to win an upset vic-

tory ove_r Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s most famous writer, in the 1990

presidential elections. This anti-politics mood also allowed Fujimori to

win public approval in March 1992 for closing a Congress he accused of

corruption and obstruction. Fujimori’s neoliberal austerity plan curtailed

inflation but caused increasing unemployment and destitution in a coun-

try where a majority of the population lived below the poverty line. His

executive coup eliminated democratic alternatives to an authoritarian

government-or an authoritarian revolution.

The main target ofFujimori’s coup was not a do-nothing Congress, but

an all-too-effective Shining Path, which also tapped into this deep vein of

discontent and despair of alternatives, expanding its support and activities

into labor unions and urban shantytowns, recruiting workers and migrants

with its disciplined organization and self-sacrificing cadres, its simplified

analyses of Peru’s problems and confident assertion that Communism was

the answer, along with its image of efficacy in a country where nothing else

seemed to work. As in the region’s other revolutions, Sendero’s greatest

strength was the weakness of the old order it wanted to overthrow.

By 1992, an estimated 40 percent of Peru’s territory and a third of its

population was beyond the control of its elected government. Sendero’s

leaders spoke of preparing the urban encirclement and insurrection that

would bring Lima to its knees and Sendero to power. “We are con-

vinced,” affirmed a Lima guerrilla leader, “that victory is already ours.”24

He spoke too soon. In much of the highlands, Sendero’s rigidity, ruth-

572 I Americas

lessness, and disrespect for local custom had undermined its initial peas-

ant support: In many indigenous communities peasant militias kept

Sendero at bay. In Lima, Sendero’s violence may have cowed rivals, but

the “support” this produced depended on Sendero’s power to coerce it.

Then, in December 1992, Abimael Guzman was captured along with

much of Sendero’s political leadership, and the tide turned. With a jailed

President Gonzalo negotiating a peace with the government in exchange

for conjugal visits, Sendero paid the price for its cult of personality in di-

visions and desertions. Suddenly, history was no longer on its side. By

1994, Sendero had been reduced to a mostly military movement cen-

tered on the coca-growing Huallaga Valley, which could still inflict dam-

age but was no longer a political threat.

By then, another revolutionary movement, which also claimed in-

digenous support, but was otherwise dramatically different from Sendero

in its character, methods and goals, had seized the world’s attention. The

Zapatistas’ sudden emergence in Mexico meant that the nation that had

experienced the first Latin American revolution of the century would

also witness the last.

“ZAPATA LIVES!” 2s

On New Year’s Day, 1994, while the Mexican government was celebrat-

ing the country’s economic union with the United States in the North

American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), a rejection of the country’s

revolutionary heritage and embrace of a globalized modernity, Indian

rebels were taking control of San Cristobal de las Casas, colonial capital

of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and least modern state.

The rebels’ brown faces might reveal Maya ancestry, but the ski-

masks that covered them and the slogans they shouted reflected a mod-

ern peasant rebellion. They had not taken up arms as Indians to reclaim

the stolen legacy of their ethnic past, but as peasants fighting to defend

the frontier lands and political autonomy they had won through their

own initiative and efforts.

Making Revolution I 573

During the preceding decades, some 200,000 migrants had left the

overpopulated highlands, with their inequality, limited lands, and political

bosses, to seek their future in the tropical frontier lands of the Lacand6n

jungle, the harsh wilderness on the border with Guatemala known as “the

desert of solitude.” There they had carved farms and ranches out of the

jungle, formed self-governing communities, and fought for the titling of

their lands as ejido cooperatives by the PRI government, whose presidents

and policies increasingly threatened their modest success. During the

1970s, Mexican governments first made half the Lacand6n into a reserve

for its tiny tribal population ( that corrupt PRI politicians would “manage”)

and then declared two-thirds of the jungle to be a protected “biosphere”

(from which all migrants were to be evicted). Many communities resisted

and armed themselves. During the 1980s, political bossism entered the pic-

ture, as state governors granted ejidos to communities willing to adhere to

the PRI. Political autonomy seemed a dream of the past. So did economic

prosperity, as coffee prices fell 60 percent beginning in 1989, followed by

a 1992 ban on cattle exports from the Lacand6n because of screw-worm

and an end of ranching credits to its communities on ecological grounds

(that the governor did not apply when it came to credits for wealthy pri-

vate ranchers). Chiapas’ small farmers, heavily dependent on coffee and

beef exports, were now threatened with bankruptcy.

Then, in the 1990s, President Salinas made two major policy shifts

that signalled the end of the Mexican Revolution and the need to start a

new one. In 1991, Salinas “reformed” the constitution to end its prom-

ise of agrarian reform. The landless youth of the highlands and the com-

munities of the Lacand6n without legal title to their lands now felt be-

trayed by their government. Then, Salinas abandoned the historic

nationalism of the Mexican revolution and agreed to integrate Mexico’s

economy with that of the United States in the North American Free

Trade Association. In the future, Chiapas’ maize farmers, who numbered

half a million in 1993, would have to compete with Iowa’s modern corn

farmers, who could produce maize at half the price. On the day in which

the NAFTA treaty took effect, the Zapatista revolt began.

574 / Americas

It was a rebellion that other actors helped stimulate. One was a radi-

calized Catholic Church, led by a remarkable bishop, Samuel Ruiz, in-

fluenced by liberation theology and empowered by the Vatican II and

Medellin conclaves. Ruiz believed that his Church’s goal was “to insert

ourselves into the culture of our people, to take on ourselves the social

Utopia hidden there, and to accompany them on their historic path.”26

Under his inspired leadership, Chiapas Indians came to “question their

oppression” and organize to combat it. By 1993, they had become, in

Bishop Ruiz’s words: “the subjects of their lives.”27

To help them organize, Ruiz made alliances with two secular groups

that the pre-Vatican II Church would have viewed as enemies. The first

was the Maoist Proletarian Line (LP), which had begun organizing in

Chiapas. When it proved more of a rival than an ally, the Chiapas

Church promoted as a counterweight a group of social workers who

turned out to be cadres of the Guevarist Forces of National Liberation.

The FLN was a 1960s guerrilla movement from the north of Mexico that

had regrouped and, encouraged by the Sandinista success, begun to or-

ganize the poor peasants of Chia pas in the 1980s. By 1990, it had re-

placed the LP as the major force in the Lacand6n and begun organizing

an armed guerrilla force, the Zapatista National Liberation Army

(EZLN), under its regional head, Sub-Comandante Marcos, a former

student of philosophy and pedagogy in Mexico City.

By then, there were eight organizations competing for the loyalties of

Chiapas’ poor peasants, including the Salinas government and rival peas-

ant unions. This intensified competition was diluting the EZLN’s sup-

port base. The economic crisis was deepening, as was discontent with the

government’s land, credit and trade policies. An October 1992 demon-

stration revealed the depth of Indian rage. Private soundings persuaded

Marcos that his followers were ready to take up arms and twenty-five

communities voted for war in 1993. Marcos only had 2000 rifles for 9000

soldiers. Most would have to fight with shotguns, pistols or even lances.

Yet, on New Year’s Day 1994, when the whole world would be watching

Mexico, they would begin their new Zapatista revolution.

Making Revolution I 575

The Zapatista rebellion was a military failure, but a political success.

Surprise favored the rebels on New Year’s Day, when they seized control

of San Cristobal and three other highland cities. But once the Mexican

government mobilized its forces, it became clear that the EZLN’s ill-

armed irregulars were no match for a modern army. By the time Presi-

dent Salinas declared a ceasefire on January 12th, the army had retaken

the highlands and the EZLN had retreated back to the Lacand6n jungle

from where it had emerged to astonish the world two weeks before.

But the EZLN’s political broadsides triumphed everywhere. Its first

“Declaration from the Lacand6nJungle”-beginning with its ringing

opening: “Today We Say ENOUGH!”-was a clarion call to an in-

creasingly discontented Mexico. Mexicans responded to its litany of

grievances-“We have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a decent

roof over our heads; no land, no work, no health care, no food, no ed-

ucation; without the right to freely and democratically elect our au-

thorities; without independence from foreigners, without peace or jus-

tice for ourselves and our children.”28-with a sense of recognition.

The radical egalitarianism of the EZLN’s “Revolutionary Laws”-

from the Labor Law’s demand that foreign companies pay Mexican

workers what they pay their foreign workers to the Urban Reform

Law’s limiting urban rents to 10 percent of the household head’s in-

come and abolishing them after fifteen years residence-also struck a

chord in Mexicans weary of the institutionalized inequalities of the

PRI’s “institutional revolution.”

The EZLN’s call for democracy-and practice of direct democracy-

resonated in a country tired of corrupt and authoritarian government,

the longest-lived, one-party regime in the world. Whatever their feelings

about the EZLN’s strategy and ideology, most Mexicans sympathized

with the struggle of poor Indians for “democracy, no more inequality,”

as one young Zapatista put it, “a life worth living, liberation, just like God

says.”29

President Salinas realized that the Zapatistas had won the battle for

the hearts and minds of Mexicans, and knew that in a presidential elec-

576 I Americas

tion year, a repressive policy could cause problems for his plans to elect

a hand-picked successor. He was also aware that his NAFTA gamble to

join the First World could go up in the smoke of his soldiers’ guns in Chi-

apas. Moreover, although only a minority of Chia pas’ Indians had taken

up arms, most shared the Zapatistas’ grievances and goals. Highland In-

dians were seizing the lands Salinas’ policies had denied them, and there

was a risk that other impoverished Indian areas, such as Oaxaca, might

join the rebellion.

So, Salinas reined in the military and his party’s “dinosaurs,” declared

a unilateral ceasefire and created a commission to negotiate a peaceful

settlement, with Bishop Ruiz as the mediator. By then, hundreds had

died in Chiapas, including some 70 Zapatista soldiers and more than 50

from Mexican security forces.

During that same fortnight, Sub-Comandante Marcos emerged as the

leader and spokesperson for the Zapatistas. He was perfect for. that role,

a master of modern media and political public relations, a postmodern

internet revolutionary for a global village, a guerrilla philosopher with an

ability to engage and enchant his international audience. It made a ski-

masked Marcos a posterboy for a European and U.S. left looking for he-

roes and causes in a post-Communist age. “We did not go to war . .. to

kill or to have them kill us.” Marcos declared. “We went to make our-

selves heard.”30 In this, the Zapatistas succeeded.

What followed were years of intermittent negotiations, which ran

aground on the government’s unwillingness or inability to implement the

structural reforms that the EZLN demanded to secure their goals: “In-

dian rights, democracy and justice, decent living standards and economic

development, women’s rights .”31

In response, Marcos and the EZLN demonstrated both creativity and

flexibility. With its plans for armed revolution in ruins, the Zapatistas

turned to reform and placed their hopes in Mexico’s emerging civil soci-

ety. In August 1994, two weeks before national elections, it convoked a

meeting of 6000 representatives of Mexico’s social movements in the La-

cand6n jungle, where they formed a new umbrella group and talked

Making Revolution I 5 77

about a new constitution. A year later, with Mexico mired in economic

crisis, the Zapatistas conducted an electronic referendum in which more

than one million Mexican supporters voted overwhelmingly in support

of the EZLN’s disarming and transforming itself into a political force.

OnJ anuary 1, 1996, two years after its armed seizure of San Cristobal de

las Casas, the Zapatistas embraced the creation of the FZLN, a “civil and

non-violent organization, independent and democratic, Mexican and na-

tional.” It was not to be a political party, but rather “a political force

whose members would not hold or aspire to take power,” but rather to

struggle for “democracy, liberty and justice in Mexico.” 32

In support of this goal, the EZLN convened “The International En-

counter for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism,” which drew some

3500 leftists from three continents to the jungle community of La Real-

idad in the summer of 1996. It was an international public relations suc-

cess, in which Marcos argued that the creation of a new kind of political

force would be “revolutionary.”

But it was the guerrilla attacks outside Chiapas in August 1996 -by

another leftist group, the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR)-that per-

suaded President Ernesto Zedillo that a law on Indian rights was needed.

By December, Zapatista and government negotiators had agreed on a

draft law on Indian rights, only to have it rejected by Zedillo, now anx-

ious to placate his party bosses. A negotiated settlement would have to

wait for the next century.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the Zapatista New Millen-

nium seemed to recede, with Chia pas itself divided by ethnicity, religion,

class, and politics-divisions that the government exploited to avoid the

concessions that the Zapatistas sought. By 1998, there was virtual civil

war between rival Indian groups in the highlands.

The election in 2000 of Vicente Fox as president, with his campaign

promise of solving the Zapatista problem “in fifteen minutes,” created

new hope of a peace accord. One of Fox’s first acts as president was to

send the COCOPA agreement on Indian rights to the congress. In sup-

port of this initiative, Marcos led an epic march to Mexico City, where

578 / Americas

indigenous Zapatista leaders addressed the congress. But the version of

the accords eventually passed by the congress was shorn of the autonomy

provision that was central to the Zapatistas. Fox’s withdrawal of the army

from Zapatista areas, however, eased tensions in Chiapas. By 2005, Za-

patista grievances were not a major political concern in Mexico as a

whole, although that year saw the creation, in the heavily indigenous

northern state of Michoacan, of the first Zapatista “autonomous munic-

ipality” outside Chiapas.

By then, it was clear that the Zapatistas had survived as a revolution-

ary group and civic movement with local power and national influence.

But it was also evident that their hopes of sparking a national transfor-

mation had faded. Still, their political impact in Mexico was far greater

than their limited military success suggested, and they remained an

evocative symbol of the relevance of revolution in a post-Communist

age.

At the start of the twenty-first century it was clear that revolutionary

movements had failed to bring a new millenium to Latin America and the

Caribbean. Yet, the persistence of poverty and increase in inequality

under neoliberalism, together with widespread feelings of powerlessness

and low participation in the region’s flawed democracies, means that the

conditions that bred revolutionary movements in the past century will

continue to exist. As a result, the collapse of communism elsewhere may

not mean the end of revolution in the Americas.

The appeal of the Zapatistas and the Shining Path in the 1990s and

the continued strength of older revolutionary movements such as

Colombia’s FARC bear witness to the continued attraction of armed rev-

olution where people despair of democratic reform. But the examples of

the Zapatistas and the Shining Path also suggest that the revolutions of

the future are likely to be different from those of the past. “There are no

paradigms anymore,” stressed Arturo Alape, an analyst of Colombia’s

FARC, the region’s oldest guerrilla group. “Each country has to create a

model of revolution that reflects its own history and conditions.”

Mexican-Americans are the oldest and
largest community of Latin American and
Caribbean origin in the United States. But
it was only in the r96os, when the strug-
gles of Chicano farmworkers such as these
demonstrators captured national atten-
tion, that they began to raise their political

profile.

During the last few decades Mexican-
Americans have become increasingly
urban, by 1990 constituting more than a
third of the population of Los Angeles.
Only recently have they begun to translate
their numbers into political power, as in
the r 990 election of Gloria Molina (left)
to the Los Angeles County Board of Su-
pervisors.

The arrival of over half a million exiles from Castro’s Cuba turned much of Miami into a
“Little Havana,” where life resembled the prerevolutionary original. Their concentration
in Miami helped Cubans retain their identity, while incorporating elements of North
American popular culture.

U.S. popular culture has been enriched by the presence of Latin American and
Caribbean communities. Gloria Estefan, “the Latin Madonna,” became a crossover pop-
music star, as have Cristina Aguilera, Ricky Martin, and Jennifer Lopez.

La~ ~erican and Caribbean communities in the United States are trying to exert in-
~reasmg mfluence over Washington’s policies toward their homelands. In 1991, Haitians
m Boston protested the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in a military coup and
demande~ _U.S. action to restore him to power, which occurred in 1994. A decade later,
other Haman-Americans pressed Washington to remove Aristide.

The 1980s and 1990s saw big waves of immigtants to the United States, most of them
from Latin America and the Caribbean. At P.S. 19 in Queens, New York, half the kinder-
garten classes are bilingual in Spanish and students come from all over the Americas to

live in the “New New York” and become “Americans.”

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THIRD EDITION

PETER WINN

FOURTEEN

North of the Border

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe

free,” wrote Emma Lazarus in 1883. Inscribed on a bronze plaque at the

base of the Statue of Liberty at the entrance to New York Harbor, these

lines expressed the promise of “the land ofliberty” for generations of im-

migrants to the United States.

During the 1980s, more immigrants arrived in the United States than

in any other decade in history. Yet, unlike millions of their predecessors,

few of them were welcomed by Lady Liberty and few came from Europe.

Most were migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean who had

traveled north, not west, to reach the United States, and crossed borders,

not oceans, to arrive at its shores.

How this nation of immigrants deals with this new wave of immi-

grants from the south may well shape its domestic history and hemi-

spheric relations during the twenty-first century. It may also force the

United States of America to rethink what it means to be

“American.”

These new immigrants have made the United States the fifth largest

Spanish-speaking country in the world. Today, it has the hemisphere’s

largest Puerto Rican city, second largest concentrations of Cubans, Sal-

vadorans, Haitians, and Jamaicans, and fourth largest Mexican metrop-

olis. People of Latin American origin have surpassed African-Americans

North of the Border I 585

as the nation’s largest minority group. Their concentrations in such large

states as California, Florida, New York, and Texas-and in some of the

country’s biggest cities-will increase their social and political impact

still further. By 202 5, they will be the largest race or ethnic group in Cali-

fornia, comprising 4 3 percent of the population of the largest state. Al-

ready more than half of Miami is of Latin American descent, and the

same is true for nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles and a quarter of Hous-

ton and New York. Increasingly, “Anglos”-a term that “Hispanics,”

people with Spanish American cultural roots, apply to all white English-

speaking North Americans-will have to come to terms with the fact that

they not only share the Americas with their Latin American and

Caribbean neighbors, but that they also share their own country with

growing communities of “Latinos,” people of Latin American descent.

The 2000 census revealed that there were more than 3 5 million His-

panics living in the continental United States, a 58 percent increase over

1980 and a nine-fold rise over 1950. By 2005, there were over 40 million

Hispanics living on the mainland and their numbers were growing four

times as fast as the U.S. population as a whole, as a result of immigra-

tion-legal and illegal-as well as higher birth rates. If current trends

continue, there will be more than roo million Hispanic-Americans by

the year 2050, when they will comprise one-quarter of this country’s

population.

These figures only confirm what many North Americans knew already.

The concentration of Hispanics in major urban areas has made them

more visible and increased public awareness of their presence and prob-

lems. Nor have Hispanic-Americans been content to remain a silent mi-

nority. Increasingly, they are participating in politics, electing represen-

tatives to defend their interests, and demanding bilingual education for

their children and a say in U.S. policy toward their countries of origin.

Some Hispanic-Americans are new neighbors, the result of the waves

of recent immigration-legal and illegal-that have multiplied the pop-

ulations of Latin American and Caribbean origin in cities around the

country. But others are descended from Hispanic colonists who had set-

586 I Americas

tled in what is today California and the Southwest long before those ter-

ritories became U.S. possessions. The Anglocentric history of the

United States, which begins with the arrival of English colonists in the

early seventeenth century, is misleading: Hispanics had been living in

what is today the United States for decades before the Pilgrims landed at

Plymouth Rock and exploring its lands for a century before John Smith

set foot in Jamestown.

THE OTHER SIDE

Mexicans were the first Hispanic-Americans, residents of territories

forcibly incorporated into the United States in the wake of the “Mexican

War” of 1845-48. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which

transformed northern Mexico into the U.S. Southwest, some eighty

thousand Mexicans lived in the ceded territories, three quarters of them

in New Mexico, a state that is still nearly 40 percent Mexican-American,

despite receiving little of the massive Mexican immigration since then.

During the nineteenth century, the flow of Mexicans across the un-

guarded border reflected the drift of people in search of land or jobs. By

1910 Mexican migrants were crossing the border in large numbers in

search of work, drawn by the far higher wages in the United States, the

one constant in a changing relationship. By then Mexican laborers were

a major presence in the fields of Texas and the mines of Arizona and Col-

orado. The demand for agricultural labor in an expanding southwestern

economy during the years that followed led U.S. growers to recruit labor

inside Mexico, offering free transportation and advances on their wages

in an often intense competition for Mexican workers.

Before 1917 migration across the border with Mexico was largely un-

regulated, and even the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924 was mostly

directed at Asians excluded by the National Origins Immigration Act of

that year. By then Mexicans had replaced Asians as the low-paid menial

labor force of California and the Southwest, whose employers used their

political influence to keep the sluice gates of migration open.

North of the Border I 587

In the decades that followed, Mexican labor migration ebbed and

flowed with the U.S. economy, expanding in eras of prosperity and con-

tracting in times of trouble-often with an assist from the U.S. govern-

ment. During the Great Depression hundreds of thousands of Mexi-

cans-including many born in the United States-were deported as

scapegoats for the high levels of unemployment. World War II meant a

renewed need for labor and a new U.S. recruitment policy, the Bracero

Program, which brought roughly fifty thousand Mexican workers per

yearto the United States between 1942 and 1964 to work mostly as agri-

cultural laborers. A growing flow of illegal Mexican migration developed

alongside this legal, if temporary, labor migration and increased when

the Bracero Program came to an end after 1964. Most of the illegal mi-

grants also crossed the border to work for a season and then return home

with the money they had saved. Increasingly, however, both legal and il-

legal migrants stayed in the United States, joining Mexican-American

communities that swelled in size, and began to appear in U.S. regions

distant from the border zone. By 2000, there were more than twenty-

four million people of Mexican descent living in the United States.

By then they had ceased to be predominantly rural laborers and had

come to occupy a major place within the urban working class of the west-

ern states. Some have made it into the middle class, as owners of small

businesses or as professionals, although Mexican-Americans graduate

from college at a rate that is only one quarter of the national average.

Mexican-Americans have also emerged as a political force that is

courted by politicians of both parties and is producing its own elected

leaders. For many this political activism was a new departure. Until re-

cent decades Mexican-Americans had been noted for their political pas-

sivity. Many did not become citizens. Others fought bravely for the U.S .

flag in foreign wars but were not active in its domestic politics-a reflec-

tion both of their subordination within the United States and their con-

tinued identification with nearby Mexico. Those who did participate in

U.S. politics tended to be Democrats, but their special needs and inter-

ests were generally neglected by both major parties.

588 I Americas

For Mexican-Americans, as for African-Americans, the 1960s were a

political watershed. Inspired in part by the civil rights and Black Power

movements, “Chicanos”-as the most politicized Mexican-Americans

now called themselves, from a corruption of “Mexicanos”-extended

their activities from moderate civil rights organizations such as LULAC

(the League of United Latin American Citizens) to radical political par-

ties such as La Raza Unida, or the United (Inda-Mexican) Race, to re-

dress their grievances and promote their interests . La Raza won local

elections in Texas and LULAC fought discrimination in California, but

both failed to win their more militant demands. Still, they did succeed in

training a generation of Chicano political leaders, and L ULAC remains

an important Latino organization.

Yet it was not Chicano electoral politics but Mexican-American labor

politics that made their struggles part of the consciousness of the larger

nation. The efforts of Cesar Chavez, a charismatic leader inspired by

Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, to organize the

exploited Mexican-American agricultural laborers of California for his

United Farm Workers, captured the conscience of the United States for

“La Causa”-and made Chicanos realize the possibilities of political ac-

tion. As they became increasingly urban, they faced different prob-

lems-substandard housing, inadequate schools, police brutality-and

found that the solutions to these problems required local political power.

By 1980 Mexican-Americans numbered over ten million. By then they

had begun to turn their numbers to political account, by electing repre-

sentatives who were themselves Chicanos, or else pledged to promote

their cause. Henry Cisneros, mayor of San Antonio from 1981 to 1989,

symbolized this new generation of Chicano politicians. An attractive

leader to both Anglos and Hispanics, Cisneros was named to President

Clinton’s first cabinet as Secretary for Housing and Urban Development

(HUD).

In the 1990s, a new Mexican-American political star rose in Los An-

geles, where Hispanics constitute nearly two fifths of the population yet

have not exercised much political influence. Gloria Molina is the

North of the Border I 589

California-born daughter of an immigrant Mexican laborer. She began

her political career as a community activist, and went on to serve in the

California State Assembly and the Los Angeles City Council. In 1991 she

became the first Chicano elected to the five-member Los Angeles

County Board of Supervisors, one of the most important local govern-

ment offices in the country, making her the highest ranking Hispanic-

American woman in U.S. politics. Molina now represents the country’s

largest Latino constituency and shares responsibility for overseeing a

county of nine million residents and a budget of twelve billion dollars.

In her new role, Gloria Molina has been a vocal and effective board

member who has been called an “anarchist” by its chair, but she has been

successful with most of her initiatives for social programs such as health

care and pro-Hispanic measures such as allowing people to testify in

Spanish before the board. “The most important thing,” stressed Sergio

Muii6z, editor of La Opinion, Los Angeles’s major Spanish-language

newspaper, “is that she has truly been the voice of a community that

didn’t have any access to the Board of Supervisors-and it’s a loud gutsy

voice.”‘

By 2005, there were other strong Chicano voices in California poli-

tics. In that year, Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Ange-

les, the second largest city in the United States, capping a political career

in which the one-time high school dropout and child of East L.A.’s

Mexican-American barrio had become a member of the city council and

speaker of the state assembly. Villaraigosa joined Ron Gonzales, who be-

came the first Hispanic to head a major California city since statehood

when he was elected mayor of San Jose in 1998 and again in 2002. Cruz

Bustamante, elected lieutenant-governor in 1999, was the first Latino

elected to statewide office in California since 1878. He was defeated for

governor of the nation’s largest state by Hollywood star Arnold

Schwarznegger in 2003, the same year that Chicano Bill Richardson be-

came governor of New Mexico. Villaraigosa’s election put him on the

cover of Newsweek, featured in a cover story on “Latino Power: L.A.’s

New Mayor-And How Hispanics Will Change American Politics.”2

590 I Americas

Nationwide, however, Latinos were still underrepresented in elected

office, accounting for some 3 percent of elected officials, despite consti-

tuting over 12 percent of the population. But this was changing, partic-

ularly in California, where Hispanics comprise more than 3 2 percent of

the population and one out of every four members of the state assembly

is Latino/a. And California is not only the nation’s largest state, but also

home to nearly one-third of its Hispanics, with “a tremendous influence

on the Latino community nationwide.”3 Elsewhere in the West, for ex-

ample, Colorado elected Mexican-American Ken Salazar to the U.S.

Senate in 2004, the same year in which Cuban-American Mel Martinez

was chosen as the U.S. senator from Florida.

The presence of Latino officeholders in state houses and major cities

may be a sign of things to come. But equally important is the growing po-

litical participation of Mexican-Americans at the grassroots level in

communities such as Bell Gardens.

THE TAKING OF BELL GARDENS

Today Bell Gardens is an urban community sandwiched between two

freeways in Southeast Los Angeles. But not long ago, its name reflected

its reality. Bell Gardens, like other communities in southern California
‘

has been transformed during the past half century from an area of rural

plots to one of urban lots.

Claude Booker was one of the original residents of Bell Gardens, back

in 1935 when it was “gardens and animals” and “about four thousand

people . . . spread around the whole area,” he recalled. “It was just a typ-

ical Midwest-type town, settled by people from the South and the Mid-

west”-and it was “a hundred percent Caucasian.”

Like most of Los Angeles, both the rural character and ethnic composi-

tion of Bell Gardens underwent dramatic changes during succeeding

decades. After World War II, building on subdivisions began, and after

1970 “you began to see the transition” from a sparsely populated rural com-

munity to a densely populated urban community, Booker related. This was

North of the Border I 591

followed during the 1980s by the “real heavy transition from Caucasian to

Hispanic.” In 1990 the population ofBell Gardens was 90 percent Hispanic.

Most of them were of Mexican descent. Some were middle-class

property owners like Marfa Chacon, who had come to Los Angeles from

Chihuahua, where her mother still lives. She was among those “who had

come to build a dream here in Bell Gardens-to build a house or estab-

lish a business and to accumulate wealth.” By 1990 she and her husband

had built five rental houses on their Bell Gardens property. Their ten-

ants, like most of the Hispanic residents of Bell Gardens, are “humble

people, working people, most of them Mexicans who have just finished

fixing up their residency papers or hadn’t really decided to become citi-

zens,” Chacon explained. “Here you feel like you’re in Mexico with your

people; you feel very comfortable here in Bell Gardens.”

But the Mexican-Americans of Bell Gardens felt far less comfortable

when they ventured into its City Hall. Virtually all its City Council mem-

bers were Anglos, as was Claude Booker, its city manager. Frank Duran,

a local businessman, was only one of many Mexican-Americans who

complained of the “arrogance” with which the city’s Hispanic majority

was treated, “especially people that didn’t know how to speak English.”

This lack of representation and respect had rankled with many His-

panic residents, but it had never moved them to action until Marfa

Chacon “got wind of the change in zoning” planned by the City Coun-

cil-which prohibited the building of more than two housing units on a

lot and mandated the removal over time of those that already existed, a

measure that could eventually affect most of the city’s forty-two thousand

residents. The result was a grassroots movement that led to a revolution

in local politics whose implications transcended the Bell Gardens city

limits.

According to Claude Booker, the goal of the rezoning ordinance was

“to stop runaway growth” so as “to not have so much high-density de-

velopment in future years.” To Mexican-American property owners like

Marfa Chacon, however, such rhetoric masked a “land grab” by the City

Council in which they were the victims. For years they had been hassled

592 I Americas

by city inspectors who cited their properties for building code violations

as minor as broken screens or cracked cement. As soon as they cured one

violation, they received notice of others. Since 1987, when the rezoning

plan was first drawn up, Bell Gardens was issuing notices of substandard

conditions “at ten times the rate of the city of Los Angeles,” recounted

Alan Gross, a lawyer who in 1992 was Bell Gardens’ city attorney. “The

main point is that none of them were ever terminated,” he explained,

which created problems in mortgaging or selling the property. Instead,

city inspectors began to harass tenants and the city manager began to

press Mexican-American property owners to sell their parcels to the

city-at the lowered valuations to which these “substandard notices” had

caused their properties to fall. Between 1987 and 1991, the city had spent

forty million dollars buying up properties. For Gross it was a classic case

of urban removal masked as urban renewal.
“They themselves said that twenty-five thousand people were going

to be affected,” recounted Marfa Chacon, who had taken the lead in get-

ting property owners together, most of them modest Mexican-American

landlords like herself. For them, the rezoning ordinance was the last

straw, lowering the value of their property and their ability to sell it. Her

friend Sophie’s parcel dropped in value from $850,000 to $250,000 as a

result. “If you came with the dream that if you bought your house when

you were young and you worked and sacrificed and saved you could have

something, and then they destroy it just so people can come build town-

houses and condominiums-that’s not justice,” Chacon charged. For

Marfa Chacon it would mean the death of her American dream, and she

was determined to fight the rezoning-and the Anglo power brokers of

Bell Gardens who had “abused us Latinos” all these years.

For behind the issue of rezoning lay the larger questions of racial prej-

udice and ethnic conflict. Marfa Chacon was convinced that the reason

the City Council pushed this rezoning was because “a majority of us were

Mexicans and the council people thought we weren’t going to do any-

thing. Because the city manager said, ‘All Mexicans are ignorant and ir-

responsible.’ ” Chacon bristled at the remark. “I thank God that I am not

North of the Border I 593

that irresponsible,” she said, “and that I am always searching for justice.”

Marfa Chacon united some seventy-five angry property owners, but

none of them had any political experience. So they went to someone in

a nearby town who did.

Rudy Garcia had been born in Arizona, but was raised in Mexico. He

returned to the United States in the 1950s and enlisted in the army. It was

only then that he became conscious of racial discrimination. “In Texas …

we got thrown out of a restaurant because we didn’t see the sign that said:

‘No dogs or Mexicans allowed.’ They want me to go fight for them, but

I can’t even eat at their restaurants!” After he was discharged, Rudy Gar-

cia moved to Los Angeles, where he found work in Huntington Park. But

he was unable to live there “because they weren’t renting to Hispanics.”

Experiences like those were one reason that he got involved in LULAC.

The other was “the need to do something for our kids” because of their

54 percent high school dropout rate. To Garcia, “this is a different type

of discrimination .. . a revolving door” that kept Mexicans from pro-

gressing. Rudy Garcia became active politically “because if we don’t

change this, we are going to fail as a people.”

In Maywood, a town near Bell Gardens, LULAC’s efforts to organize

the Hispanic community in the face of a similar zoning problem a few

years before had failed to stir it to action. So when Marfa Chacon and her

group came to Garcia for advice, he leaped at the opportunity, which he

saw “as a very important political movement for the community.” For

Rudy Garcia, the underlying issue was representation. “I said to myself,

‘This is it. The Southeast will never be the same again. First, we get our

people elected there in Bell Gardens and then the rest of the Southeast

cities will go.’ Throughout the Southeast areas we’re from 88 to 95 per-

cent, and look at the representation-there’s none!”

Garcia provided the nascent Bell Gardens movement with the politi-

cal leadership they lacked, and brought in Alan Gross, an Anglo lawyer

who had taken part in the Maywood effort, to furnish legal advice and as-

sistance. They formed a “No Rezoning Committee,” opened an office,

installed phones, and the complaints started to roll in. “People all over

594 I Americas

town who now had a place to vent their frustrations and send their com-

plaints were calling and coming in,” Gross recounted, “and we were

hearing all kinds of complaints, focusing in large part on the arrogance

of the people who ran the city government.”

The committee decided to organize a recall drive to force a new City

Council election. The problem was that many of the Hispanic residents

of Bell Gardens were not U.S. citizens, and among those who were, few

registered to vote and fewer still cast their ballots. As a result, Claude

Booker admitted, “in a town of forty thousand, six or seven hundred

votes would elect a person.”

In response, the No Rezoning Committee decided on a two-pronged
strategy. One goal was to convince Mexicans to become U.S. citizens and

to register to vote, because when Rudy Garcia asked a meeting packed

with one hundred angry Mexicanos, “How many of you here can vote?”

only four or five raised their hands. So, Garcfa said, “Okay, we are going

to get each and every one of you to become a citizen.” First, he helped

them overcome artificial barriers created by interviewers who failed

Mexican applicants for not knowing President Reagan’s favorite food.

Then he established “citizenship classes” and got four to five hundred

people to

become citizens.

The second problem was to get the Hispanic community to vote. A

registration drive turned passive citizens into eligible voters, while an in-

novative strategy of getting people unlikely to come to the polls to vote

by absentee ballot addressed the problem oflow Hispanic voter turnout.

When the recall ballots were counted on March 10, 1992, “it was a land-

slide,” Rudy Garcfa related. “We beat them by sixty-two percent.” A sec-

ond vote one month later confirmed this shift in political power, elect-

ing a Hispanic majority to the City Council that included Rudy Garcia

and Frank Duran. In Bell Gardens, Mexican-Americans were no longer

a political minority.

The rezoning and recall movement was an important learning expe-

rience for all concerned, although people active in it extracted different

meanings. For Frank Duran, a neophyte city councilman, it was “the start

North of the Border I 595

of an education” and the beginning of opening up the political system to

Mexican-Americans in his community. “We’ll probably be getting more

people coming in to the council meetings and start getting involved-

and then that person will talk to someone else and it will mushroom.”

Alan Gross, the Anglo lawyer and activist, took a longer view. What

impressed Gross was that “over the year the inhibitions against speaking

out have worn away.” At the start, Mexican-Americans had been afraid

to speak their mind and challenge the Anglo authorities who controlled

their community, but by late 1991 “they would go to the City Council

meetings and stand up there and vent their frustrations and tell the coun-

cil what they thought of them-older people, younger people, women,

men, high school students, priests, everybody.” He recalled going home

to Beverly Hills and telling his friends: ” ‘You would pay money to go and

see this.’ It was a fantastic lesson in democracy!”

It was also a lesson in the value of citizenship and political participa-

tion. Marfa Chacon had lived in the United States for twenty years but

had never become a U.S. citizen because she “never thought it was nec-

essary” and “always thought that [she] wanted to be a Mexican and to go

back,” she explained. “I had to suffer and go so low as to have my rights

taken away before I finally said-Enough!” Chacon had become a citi-

zen during the recall drive and it changed her views. “We have rights,

and if they don’t give them to us, then we have to take them. The Con-

stitution of the United States is there for everybody,” Marfa Chacon af-

firmed. “Latinos need to fight because we have a very bright future, but

we have to unite and we have to show people that we can take the reins

of government.”

For Rudy Garcia, too, the lesson was empowerment, but he saw it in

a larger frame. He now uses the Bell Gardens movement in his citizen-

ship classes, to demonstrate that “each and every one of you that is here

studying for citizenship … you’re going to be part of the process. You’re

going to be able to participate. You’re going to be able to tell somebody:

‘Hey, wait a minute. You don’t shine me off like that. I voted for you,

Mister’-something we never had the opportunity to say before.” But it

596 I Americas

was the implications of the Bell Gardens victory for other Los Angeles

communities that was its greatest significance for him. “I look at Bell

Gardens as a first domino,” he explained. “It went down … and I will

make sure that it continues to go from one city to the next city.” They

would use rezoning, recalls, “whatever it takes, because whether we go

over, under, around, or through it, we’re going to do it. This is going to

happen.” For Garcia, Bell Gardens marked the end of an era for the

area’s Mexican-Americans: “We are tired of being victims and second-

class citizens. We no longer want to get on the bus and sit in the back.

Now we want to drive the bus-hell, we want to own the bus. Why not?

We’re the majority, right?” A decade later, the mayor and all the mem-

bers of the city council were Latino.

But Latino empowerment through elections is not the only thing that

is happening in Los Angeles, as the dramatic riots of April 1992 under-

scored. While transfixed Americans watched South-Central Los Ange-

les burn on their television screens, commentators presented it as an out-

burst of African-American rage in the wake of the acquittal of white

police officers accused of beating a black motorist, Rodney King.

Yet in a city in which nearly two out of five people are of Hispanic de-

scent, their invisibility was striking as Anglos rushed to define the issue

in the familiar terms of black-white racial conflict. Only gradually did it

become clear that many of the rioters and victims—one third of those

killed and arrested and 40 percent of those who suffered property dam-

age-were not blacks but Hispanics. “Latinos actually got the brunt of

this,” argued demographer Dr. David Hayes-Bautista, head ofU.C.L.A.’s

Chicano Studies Research Center. “They got beat up, burned out, and ar-

rested. Yet it is still being looked at as a black-white issue.”4

Equally surprising to many was that in large part, the Hispanics in-

volved were not Mexican-Americans-the established Chicano barrios

of East Los Angeles remained mostly quiet during the riots-but Cen-

tral Americans, recent immigrants who peopled decaying South-Central

neighborhoods where there are today as many Hispanics as blacks. The

influx of Central Americans during the 1980s has added hundreds of

North of the Border I 597

thousands of Hispanics to Los Angeles’s ethnic mix and made it the

world’s second largest Salvadoran city. Most of these recent residents are

illegal immigrants, whose fears of being deported make them vulnerable

to exploitation and abuse . Many of them work in jobs in domestic service,

sweatshops, and agriculture where they get paid less than the minimum

wage, receive no benefits, and run greater risks of injuries. In South-

Central Los Angeles, one third of the Hispanics live below the poverty

line and many sleep in crowded rented garages. These people had little

reason to defend their neighborhood stores-though many of them

were owned by enterprising members of their own community-and

every incentive to participate in the looting.

Many were also refugees who brought with them memories that

shaped their behavior. Salvadorans often “looted” food and diapers.

“We’ve been through things like this in El Salvador, so the first thing you

do is to be sure that there will be enough food to feed the family,” ex-

plained Francisco, a Salvadoran in South-Central. “Unconsciously many

people acted as if they were still back there.”5 As far as the U.S. govern-

ment was concerned, they ought to be back in Central America. Illegal

migrants who were arrested were summarily deported. One result was

that Los Angeles youth gangs began to appear in San Salvador, brought

there by deported Americanized teenagers, adding their violence to El

Salvador’s already complex problems.

Faced with abuses of police authority, the Central Americans of

South-Central had little recourse. Unlike the Mexican-Americans of Bell

Gardens, they had no political representation-and as illegal immi-

grants little prospect of electing representatives. When Hispanic politi-

cal and community leaders met in Chicano East L.A. after the riots to

chart a common course, they were unable to identify a single leader from

South-Central to invite. “At a time when we really needed to reach out

there, we found that we were not as informed as we could have been

about who the Latino leaders were in that area,” Gloria Molina con-

fessed. “All of us have a lot of work to do to learn about the changing de-

mographics of South-Central Los Angeles.”6

598 I Americas

But Los Angeles is not the only city in the United States whose de-

mographics have been transformed during recent decades by the flood of

migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In 1959, Miami was a

city of southern whites, retired Jews, and aspiring blacks that styled itself

a winter resort for the northern United States. Today it has a Cuban

mayor, a Hispanic majority, and a sizable Haitian minority, and regards

itself as the capital of the Caribbean.

A LITTLE HAVANA, A CUBAN METROPOLIS

In Miami, Eighth Street is now known by its Spanish name, Calle Ocha.

The main street of Little Havana, it is the core of a Cuban community

that dominates the city. It is also the heart of South Florida’s large and

growing Hispanic population, which comes together once a year in the

Calle Ocha Festival, the biggest Latino street fair in the United States.

In 2004, more than a million people attended this annual event, where

they ate Latino food, listened to Latino music, and danced to Latino

rhythms. Most of them were Cuban, but many were from Central or

South America, members of the more recent immigrant wave to South

Florida that has diluted the Cuban character of Miami’s Hispanic com-

munity even while confirming its ascendancy. Today Miami is the largest

Latino-led city in the United States and the first major North American

city to undergo such a radical transformation of its ethnic character. But

first and foremost, it is a Cuban city, the largest aside from Havana, and

far more prosperous than Cuba’s capital some ninety miles away.

Like Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans have been in the United

States for more than a century. But the origins of the Miami community

are more recent, and the bulk of the Cuban immigrants arrived in the

United States after 1959. Moreover, from the start, the Cuban commu-

nity in the United States has been composed of exiles whose migration

was shaped by political events rather than economic processes.

The first Cubans to settle in the United States were emigres fleeing

Spanish repression of the Cuban independence movement that rose in

North of the Border I 599

rebellion in 1868 but did not triumph until three decades later with U .S.

intervention. Jose Marti, the Cuban poet and patriot, was only one of

many independence leaders who took refuge in the United States and

stayed to organize the struggle for Cuban independence from its shores,

relying on the resources of the Cuban communities concentrated in

New York and in Florida’s cigar-making centers of Tampa and Key

West. But the size of the Cuban-American community remained small

before the Cuban revolution, probably not exceeding thirty thousand

people in 1959.
During the two decades that followed, over eight hundred thousand

Cubans fled their island, more than 8 5 percent of whom settled in the

United States and Puerto Rico. The impact of this intense immigration

was magnified by the concentration of Cubans in the Miami area, which

despite U.S. government efforts to disperse them, was home to three out

of five Cuban-Americans in 1980.

This Cuban emigration wave began during the early days of Castro’s

revolution with the supporters of defeated dictator Fulgencio Batista at

the start of 1959 and continued with upper- and middle-class opponents

of the revolutionary regime. During the four years of increasingly radi-

cal revolution that followed, over 200,000 Cubans came to the United

States-landowners and industrialists whose properties had been expro-

priated, managers whose enterprises had been nationalized, and profes-

sionals and small businessmen who saw no future for themselves in a

Communist Cuba.

Luis Botif6ll came in this first wave of Cuban exiles. “I left Havana in

August 1960,” he related, because “I was a lawyer and I didn’t see how I

could survive under a Communist regime in which there were no rights,

no free enterprises. So I decided to come to this country with my family,

just for a short time, because I didn’t think that the situation would last

for a long time. Thousands of Cubans like me came under those condi-

tions.” Botif6ll was also typical of that first wave of Cuban emigres in that

he arrived in Miami with the intention of taking part in reversing the rev-

olution he had fled. This was encouraged by the U.S. government, which

600 I Americas

treated the exiles as “freedom fighters” and recruited heavily in the exile

community for the CI& secret army against Castro. “We came here with

the purpose of going back to Cuba. We came as exiles. We didn’t come

to stay. We didn’t come just because we thought we could get a better life

here than we had in our country. We came here because of circumstances

in Cuba that we thought would not last long-and that in the meantime

being here we could help to overthrow Castro.”

It was the failure of the CI& exile army at the Bay of Pigs in April

1961 and of the U.S. efforts to oust Castro that culminated in the mis-

sile crisis of October 1962 that turned a group of refugees into a com-

munity of immigrants. More than half a million Cubans would arrive in

the United States during the two decades that followed, but this first

group of exiles defined the community they joined, charted its course,

and shaped its character.

“When I first came here, I didn’t expect to stay, so I didn’t want to en-

gage in anything,” recalled Luis Botif6ll. “I just wanted to survive, wait-

ing for the day of going back to Cuba.” Once they realized that they were

in the United States for the long-term-and possibly forever-Cuban ex-

iles like Botif6ll began to adapt to their new country and to make their way.

They were helped in starting out by their status as political refugees, which

gave them legal residence in the United States and access to government

assistance denied other migrants from

Latin America and the Caribbean.

But, above all, they were helped by the capital, skills, credentials, and ex-

perience that they brought with them to Florida, the site of$150 million

in Cuban real estate investments even before the revolution. Botif6ll

began at the top, in the Republic National Bank, which was taken over by

wealthy Cuban exiles. “I got involved with this bank that was changed

from being a community American bank to a Cuban bank. I started as a

member of the board of directors. Eventually I became chairman.”

Cuban-run financial institutions like the Republic National “played a

very important part in the development of this community,” Botif6ll as-

serted, “because … in those days, the Cubans who came here didn’t have

a financial statement that could support a loan. But since we knew them

North of the Border I 601

from Cuba, and knew their abilities and how honest they were, we took

a chance with them and gave them what we call a ‘character loan’-a loan

based on their character, not on their collateral. Fortunately, these people

were very successful; they paid us back and continued to be our clients.

And that made this bank not only the biggest spending bank in the

United States but also the biggest local bank, with over a billion dollars

in assets.”

Among Republic National’s clients “from the beginning,” was Felipe

Valls, today one of Miami’s most successful entrepreneurs. Valls also

came to the United States in 1960, but unlike Botif6ll, he came without

capital or connections, and with two children and a pregnant wife to sup-

port, so he “started working in a restaurant equipment business in Miami

Avenue.” Valls was typical of the middle-class Cubans who constituted

the bulk of that first wave of exiles. “Most of the Cuban businessmen who

came here in that year had small businesses in Cuba,” he explained. Once

in Miami, “most of them went to work and then opened their own busi-

nesses.” Valls worked in a restaurant equipment business for two years

and “then I opened a very small place, importing espresso coffee ma-

chines from Italy …. That was my start.” It was a rocky one, because “no

Cuban had any credit here” so “I had to give credit to my own customers.

So I had no money and it was a big struggle because the profits here were

big but not enough to finance the equipment.” From there Valls

branched out into restaurants, including the Versailles, today one of the

most popular Cuban restaurants in Miami’s Little Havana, but at first “a

very small place with a seating capacity of sixty people. Now it’s over

three hundred.” By 1992, he owned twelve restaurants and a glass factory,

as well as shopping centers and other real estate. Today, a stretch of Calle

Ocho bears his name and his son Felipe Valls,Jr., employs more than one

thousand people, most of them Cuban-as is the food in his eighteen

restaurants and most of the customers who consume it.

It is this enclave character of Miami’s Cuban community that gave it

an autonomy and strength lacking in other Hispanic-American commu-

nities without comparable capital, education, and business experience.

602 I Americas

“The Cubans who came here were lawyers, bankers, businessmen,”

stressed Botif6ll, contrasting them with immigrants who came to the

United States to “make a better living based only on their hands.” As a

result, the Cubans “had the know-how … the ability, and if they had a

little help and they had a market-which was created by ourselves-they

could succeed.”

Felipe Valls was not the only Cuban exile to begin his business career

in Miami with a small cafe or restaurant in the 1960s and end as a man-

ufacturer three decades later. In prerevolutionary Cuba U.S. enterprises

had dominated the industrial sector, limiting Cubans to the role of man-

agers and redirecting Cuban entrepreneurs into services and real estate.

It was to these sectors that they gravitated when they first settled in

Miami, before broadening out into manufacturing. Together these dy-

namic Cuban entrepreneurs created an economic enclave with low-cost

labor provided by more recent Cuban emigres from working-class and

lower-middle-class backgrounds. As each wave of Cuban exiles found its

bearings and began to work its way up into the middle class, it was re-

placed by newer arrivals both directly from Cuba and from other areas

of the United States. The last sizable Cuban wave was the more than one

hundred twenty-five thousand Mariel refugees of 1980. Since then, the

smaller groups of Cubans arriving in Miami have not kept pace with the

labor needs of its expanding economy. As a result, the bottom rungs of

Little Havana’s labor force-such as the unskilled jobs in Valls’s restau-

rants-are now filled by Central Americans, who arrived during the

1980s from Nicaragua or El Salvador, as refugees from leftist revolution

or rightist repression.

Few Miami Cubans are wealthy and many are poor, but most are mid-

dle class, and the average income of Cuban-Americans is now as high as

the national average for all U.S. citizens, the only community of Latin

American and Caribbean origin to have reached that plateau. As Cubans

made it into the middle class, many of them moved out of Little Havana

into the Miami suburbs, where they have flavored their American dream

with a Spanish accent and a Caribbean style.

North of the Border I 603

Businessmen such as Botif6ll and Valls have done far better than the

national average. Today Cubans own a disproportionate share of the na-

tion’s largest Hispanic-owned businesses. They have also been hired by

U.S. corporations as their intermediaries with Latin America. Until his

death in 1997, Roberto Goizueta, the chairman and president of Coca-

Cola, was “the richest and most influential Hispanic in the United

States.” Under Goizueta’s direction Coca-Cola not only grew and prof-

ited-its shares rose more than 900 percent in value-but it also became

a more international company, with Latin America and the Caribbean

accounting for much of its lucrative expansion overseas. After his death

from cancer, Coca-Cola maintained a bilingual website in his memory,

as a “tribute to the man who brought the company to the gates of the 21st

Century.”7 Coca-Cola’s new international focus reflected Goizueta’s own

background. It also paralleled the increasingly international orientation

of Miami’s Cuban-led economy.
With Cubans who spoke their language and understood their culture

running Miami’s financial institutions, Latin American capital-flight

capital looking for a safe harbor or drug money in need oflaundering-

poured into South Florida. Its banks became some of the nation’s busiest

and most profitable-Republic National went from some ten million

dollars in deposits in 1967 to over one billion dollars by 1992-and

Miami became the financial capital of the Caribbean Basin.

It also became the U .S. commercial gateway to Latin America.

Miami’s port surpassed New Orleans in its Latin American trade, and its

airport bested Atlanta’s in its international traffic. “We are responsible

for making Miami a center of commerce with Latin America,” claimed

Luis Botif6ll. “Because even though Miami has a very good geographi-

cal position, in order to succeed in attracting people from Latin Amer-

ica you have to speak their language,” he stressed. “So we provided the

language . And the multinational companies started using Cubans as rep-

resentatives in Latin America. So these Cubans were more or less am-

bassadors of goodwill for Miami. And the people in Latin America real-

ize if we have to do something in the United States we better go to Miami

604 I Americas

where we can make ourselves understood. So we created that relation be-

tween Miami and Latin America which is in certain part the reason why

Miami has grown so much,” Botif6ll asserted. “Castro was a blessing for
Miami!”

In recent years, Miami’s Cuban community has begun to flex its po-

litical muscles as well as its economic strength. At first, Cuban exiles con-

centrated their economic energies on making it in Miami, while focus-

ing their political efforts at the national level on trying to influence U.S.

policy toward Castro’s Cuba. Right-wing exiles grouped in semiclandes-

tine organizations such as Alfa-66, many of whose members had been

trained by the CIA, made politics their priority. Their goal was to over-

throw Castro and they were willing to use intimidation, even terrorism,
against those who did not share this objective.

As the years passed and Castro consolidated power, Miami’s Cuban

community also began to focus on local politics. At first, Miami’s Cubans

were content to support a Puerto Rican, Maurice Ferre, a diplomatic

moderate, for mayor. But as their numbers and citizenship grew, Cubans

pressed for a comparable share of political power. By 1990, Cubans were

a majority in Miami and they deserted Ferre to choose one of their own,

Harvard-educated Xavier Suarez, as the first Cuban mayor of a major

U.S. city. He was followed by Joe Carollo in 1996. Also, in 1996, they

elected Alex Penelas as Miami-Dade County’s first Executive Mayor.

Penelas, a dynamic, telegenic politician with national ambitions, leads

the Southeast’s largest metropolitan area, with more than 2 million res-

idents. In 2004, Miami-Dade votes helped elect Mel Martinez, the first
Cuban-American U.S. senator.

Cubans have been equally successful in national politics. Unlike

Mexican-Americans, the wealthier and more conservative Cuban-

American community linked itself to the Republican party, which it

helped to break the Democrats’ domination of Florida politics. In return,
successive Republican administrations in Washington gave its Cuban

constituents, led by the right-wing Cuban National Foundation, virtual

control over its policy toward Castro’s Cuba, rewarding them with the

North of the Border I 605

creation of Radio Marti, a powerful station run by conservative Cubans

and beamed to Cuba. Cuban-Americans became the first community of

Latin American and Caribbean origin to gain the kind of leverage over

U.S. policy toward their country of origin exercised by Jewish-

Americans or Greek-Americans. They maintained this leverage even

under the Democratic Clinton administration and extended it under

George W Bush.

With economic and political power have come resentments-from

the former Anglo majority they displaced, from the African-American

minority whose hopes of progress they dashed in the process of securing

their own, and from other immigrant groups that have fared less well.

Haitians, for example, have bristled at the special treatment that

Cubans have received, which they ascribe to racial discrimination. The

most dramatic difference has been in the past reception of would-be im-

migrants from Cuba and Haiti, neighboring islands with very different

populations and politics. Cubans have been welcomed as political

refugees from a “totalitarian government … while the Haitians also were

coming from an authoritarian government but were still not accepted in

this country,” charged Rolande Dorancy, an attorney at Miami’s Haitian

Refugee Center. To her, this proved that “it’s a racial problem. The

Cubans are considered to be white and the Haitians are black.” As a re-

sult, she claimed, instead of the open-arms welcome that Cuban refugees

received, the Haitian “boat people” fleeing their country’s brutal military

dictatorship were intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard and, as

“economic migrants,” returned to their country, where many suffered

persecution. In fact, many Haitian refugees were fleeing political perse-
cution, while many Cuban immigrants were looking for better economic

opportunities.

But even those Haitians who made it to Miami—over roo,ooo by

1998-complain that they have been discriminated against by the U.S.

government. “If you walk through Little Haiti and Little Havana, you

will see there’s a big difference,” Dorancy underscored, contrasting Hait-
ian poverty with Cuban prosperity. “The Haitians who are coming don’t

606 I Americas

have a way of supporting themselves economically. But the Cubans do,

because the U.S. government gave them their patronage,” she charged.

Haitians also face job discrimination from Cubans in Miami, she

claimed, and not “only because we don’t speak Spanish, because we do

have Haitians speaking Spanish. It is because of the color of our skin.”

Many African-Americans in Miami feel even more resentful. “Before

the influx of Cubans in the early 1960s, blacks felt that with the civil

rights movement, we were in the process of really energizing our com-

munity economically and politically,” recounted African-American at-

torney H. T Smith. “Now, since so much is based upon Latin America

and speaking Spanish, African-Americans blame Cubans for taking away

their jobs and political empowerment … At least 90 percent of black

Miami” does.

African-American community leaders like Smith argue that local An-

glos still “have the money and the real power” in Miami. He contends

that they have manipulated these tensions to play off “the African-

American community and the Cuban-American community against each

other in the typical divide-and-conquer-type approach to maintain its

power.”

To many Anglos, however, their concern is not retaining power in

Miami, but “becoming foreigners in their own country.” Philip Thomas,

a leader of Miami’s “English only” movement, was willing to acknowl-

edge that Cuban immigrants had “given a great impetus to the city,” but

contended that “the quality of life has suffered” in Miami. “Whereas be-

fore we had a fairly homogeneous community and things were quiet and

peaceful, now you have a great deal of ethnic tension that we didn’t have

before. Nearly two thirds of the people living here now have come from

other parts of the Americas, bringing in a wide variety of cultures and a

spectrum of other languages, Spanish more than any other.” Thomas’s

daughter had had to learn Spanish before she could land a job in a local

bank. “Spanish has become so much a dominant language here, that if

you’re not conversant in Spanish, you are pretty much frozen out of a

great many opportunities.”

North of the Border I 607

It was this growing predominance of Spanish in Miami that persuaded

the Herald, the city’s leading newspaper, to begin publishing a Spanish-

language edition in 1976. For the Herald, a venerable daily confronted by

dramatic changes in the community it served, it was a business decision,

as was its creation in 1987 of a full-fledged Spanish newspaper, El Nuevo

Herald. Its Anglo publishers sought “to meet the needs of more people

coming in from different parts of Latin America-Central Americans,

Colombians, Puerto Ricans,” explained El Nuevo editor Carlos Verdecia.

“The Cuban exodus stopped, but that made the Hispanic community

more diverse and we needed to address that.” Today only half of this

Spanish-speaking community is Cuban, and El Nuevo Herald has become

“not a Cuban paper” but rather “a paper for all Hispanics in South

Florida.”
Despite its efforts to adapt to changing demographics, the Miami Her-

ald has had to confront differences in political culture. When El Nuevo

Herald published charges of corruption leveled against Jorge Mas

Canosa, the leader of the Cuban National Foundation, Carlos Verdecia

was accused of being a “Communist” and received death threats. “The

Cuban-American National Foundation,” Verdecia asserted, “is a group

that has been very successful in changing the approach to the Cuban

issue in the political system of the United States. They created PACs,

they created lobbying arms. They’ve been very influential in Washing-

ton.” But “they have not been as successful in learning how to deal with

a free press in a democratic system.” In a Miami dominated by Cuban ex-
iles, a hard line on Castro-and unquestioning support of his enemies-

is still a political litmus test. The death of Mas Canosa in 1997, however,

left a vacuum that has yet to be filled, and created an opening for more

moderate Cuban voices to be heard, although this gradual process may

take a generation.
As the generation that fled Cuba ages and passes from the scene, their

obsession with overthrowing Castro and support of rightist politics may

fade as well. The generation of Cubans raised in the United States has

other concerns and priorities, more similar to those of their Anglo peers

608 / Americas

than their Cuban-born parents. They have gone to college in similar

proportions and acquired the professional degrees that are passports to

success in the United States.

They have also integrated into U.S. society much more than their par-

ents and absorbed far more of Anglo culture, while infusing it with their

own unique contribution. Their stance is symbolized by the crossover

success of Gloria Estefan, the “Latin Madonna,” whose fusion of Anglo-

American pop lyricism with Caribbean rhythms made her a national star.

Estefan, the daughter of a Batista bodyguard who was captured at the Bay

of Pigs, lacks his political commitments and stresses the difference be-

tween her generation and older Cuban exiles who have attacked her for

supporting cultural exchanges with Havana. “Cubans who’ve grown up

in the United States have the best of both worlds,” she affirmed, “because

we’ve been inspired by the business mind and the unbelievable freedom

of the Anglo world, but we have a lot of our own ethnic flavor, especially

inMiami.”8

Unless the collapse of Castro’s Cuba or another massive wave of

refugees fleeing the crisis of communism reinforces their preoccupation

with the island to the south, Miami’s Cuban community is likely to con-

tinue its successful integration into North American society on its own

terms.

To some, this Cuban success story-sticking together and using

their numbers, language, and culture to obtain their American dream-

is a formula for other Latino groups to follow. To others, the Cuban suc-

cess was a product of a time and place that are difficult to replicate. Luis

Botif6ll himself stressed the uniqueness of the Cuban experience in

Miami, with its large numbers of professionals and businessmen. He was

also aware that the peculiar advantages of Miami were not confined to

its geographical location. “Coming to Miami had the advantage that

Miami was a little place, so our presence here could be important,” Bo-

tif6ll explained. If “we had gone to New York or Chicago, I’m sure we
would not be successful, because we would get mixed up in that big me-

tropolis.”

North of the Border I 609

PUERTO RICAN AND PROUD

June 14 is Flag Day in the United States, and in New York, red, white,

and blue flags were everywhere on a hot Sunday in 1992. Yet the flags

were not the stars and stripes of the United States, but the lone-star ban-

ner of Puerto Rico. Pride was the watchword for the day, along with an

insistence that with education and persistence Puerto Ricans, too, could

share the American dream, despite increasing poverty, unemployment,

drug use, street crime, and school dropouts.
It was the largest march in the Puerto Rican Day parade’s thirty-five-

year history, with some one hundred thousand marchers and more than

a million spectators, making it the year’s biggest demonstration of eth-

nic pride in New York City. The high turnout was reflected in the polit-

ical importance of the event, as candidates of all ethnic backgrounds and

ideological persuasions used the occasion to woo a potentially decisive

voting bloc, although one that, like Mexican-Americans, too often has

not registered and shown its political strength at the polls.

It was a joyous occasion and a vibrant parade, with drum majorettes

dressed like Middle Americans but moving to syncopated Caribbean

rhythms exemplifying the mix of North and Latin American that ~s

today’s “Nuyoricans,” or New York Ricans. As the marchers made their

way up Fifth Avenue past Rockefeller Center, little girls in red, white, and

blue waved Puerto Rican flags from their fathers’ shoulders in time to the

salsa beat. “We are here to show our pride in being Puerto Rican and to

celebrate our culture,” one man in the crowd explained as others nodded

agreement. “We are both Americans and Puerto Ricans.”

After Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans are the largest group of

Hispanics on the U.S. mainland. What makes this remarkable is th~t

Puerto Rico has a population-a little under 4 million in 2000-that 1s

roughly one third the size of Cuba’s. There are nearly as many Puerto

Ricans on the mainland-some 3 .4 million-as on the island. Part of the

explanation for this proportionally larger Puerto Rican presence is _that

they are not foreign immigrants but, since 1917, U.S. citizens by birth,

610 / Americas

who need no visas to make the journey and no green cards to remain or

work.

Like Cuba, Puerto Rico came within the U.S. orbit as a result of the

Spanish-American War of 1898, which transformed a Spanish colony

into a U.S . possession. Capital from the mainland flooded the island,

turning self-sufficient farms into export plantations and their displaced

peasants into rural migrants to burgeoning cities. The Depression of the

1930s hit Puerto Rico with particular severity. New Deal reformers re-

sponded with the creation of a self-governing “commonwealth” and a

program of industrial development known as “Operation Bootstrap,”

which modernized the island but failed to provide jobs for most of the

migrants flooding its cities.

When their expectations of jobs in the industries they saw around

them and of participating in the consumer society they saw on television

were disappointed in San Juan and Ponce, Puerto Ricans sought to ful-

fill them on the mainland, aided by inexpensive postwar air fares and ag-

gressive labor recruiting for expanding U.S . industries in need of un-

skilled workers. In 1945 there were fewer than one hundred thousand

Puerto Ricans living on the mainland, but their numbers multiplied rap-

idly during the decades that followed.

Most of them settled in the New York City area, where Puerto Rican

men found jobs in factories, hotels, and restaurants, while women

worked as seamstresses and domestics. As with Mexicans in the South-

west, Puerto Ricans filled the need for low-wage menial labor in the ex-

panding economy of the Northeast. Over time, the concentration of

mainland Puerto Ricans in New York fell from 80 percent in 1950 to less

than 40 percent by 1980. They branched out into New England, where

Hartford, the insurance capital, with its service jobs, became their second

largest mainland city and the mill towns of Massachusetts offered factory

work. They also headed west to Chicago, where the Puerto Rican and

Mexican migration streams met and mingled. In New York, Puerto Ri-

cans settled in decaying neighborhoods vacated by earlier immigrant

groups who had made it into the middle class and moved out to the sub-

North of the Border I 6 II

urbs, turning Italian East Harlem into Spanish Harlem and the Jewish

Lower East Side into Loisaida. By 1980 New York had become the

world’s largest Puerto Rican city.

By then the light industries of the Northeast had begun to decline in

the face of competition from lower-wage areas of the U.S. South and the

Third World. Moreover, the Puerto Rican hold on unskilled jobs in New

York was being contested by newer immigrants-many of them illegal-

from other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean who were will-

ing to work for less and in conditions that Puerto Ricans, as U.S. citizens

and union members, would no longer accept.

But escalating unemployment in Puerto Rico itself combined with the

presence of relatives and the availability of social services in New York to

sustain the flow of migrants despite the decline of job opportunities. The

result was an enlarged but impoverished Puerto Rican population, which

at the start of the new century was in danger of joining poor African-

Americans as a permanent underclass, with similar income and education

levels, drug problems and crime rates.

But many Nuyoricans are neither poor nor drug pushers. They have

made it into the middle class and become educated professionals, who

offer their community political and cultural leadership. Nearly rn per-

cent of mainland Puerto Ricans are college graduates, double the rate of

Mexican-Americans, although only half the national average. Geraldo

Rivera and Jennifer Lopez are only two of the Puerto Rican success sto-

ries who have become household names in Anglo as well as Puerto Rican

homes.
Even in areas like the South Bronx that have become national bywords

for poverty and urban blight, Puerto Ricans have struggled to retain their

dignity and culture. Lacking the political strength of California’s Chi-

canos or the economic resources of Miami’s Cuban community, Puerto

Ricans have turned to their culture as a source of community, identity,

and pride. In burned-out neighborhoods whose empty lots were filled

with garbage and industrial wastes and whose streets had been taken over

by drug dealers, community gardens began to appear, along with casitas,

612 / Americas

little frame houses that served as cultural centers and places for children

to play and teenagers to hang out.

For Jose Rivera, who was born in Puerto Rico but raised in the Bronx,

the casitas are also an affirmation of his community’s continuity, of its

links to its island legacy and culture. “The casitas go back to Puerto Rico ,

where people would build little houses by the rivers that they could move

from place to place when the government forced them to relocate,” he

explained. But few of the Puerto Rican migrants who moved into the

apartment buildings of New York City thought that the time would come

when they would once again build their casitas-in the Bronx.

“In the late 1960s we had a lot of problems in the Bronx with fires,”

Rivera recounted. “Landlords were benefiting from the destruction of

their buildings for the insurance, and you had fires that would burn down

five or six complete blocks.” His own neighborhood “turned into a des-

olate area” of demolished buildings and empty lots. “And people got

tired of seeing them used to dump garbage and abandoned cars and in-

dustrial wastes, so people got together and planted community gardens

and built these casitas . .. so that they would have a place to hang out,” he

explained. “People would come to the casita to play music or to celebrate

holidays together.”

The casitas have defied the efforts of an uncomprehending city bu-

reaucracy to tear them down and emerged as oases of hope and symbols

of the survival of New York’s Puerto Rican community even amid the

squalor and violence of the South Bronx. They also began the renewal of

Jose Rivera’s neighborhood. The communities organized themselves

around the casitas, but then went on to bring the gangs and drug problems

of their barrios under control. This demonstration that they could fight

urban blight was recognized by the city, and Rivera’s neighborhood is now

“being remodeled and becoming a good place to live, with lots of smaller

houses, which are less vulnerable to vandalism”-and more Puerto Rican,

he asserted, “because many of us are from the country. So it’s really like

bringing Puerto Rico here: The casitas are Puerto Rico in New York.”

They are also cultural centers, where Puerto Ricans like Jose Rivera

North of the Border I 613

maintain their heritage. Rivera is a full-time musician, lead singer, and

drummer with Los Pleneros de la ‘2 1, a group “dedicated to the preser-

vation of Puerto Rican culture and Afro-Caribbean folk music,” he ex-

plained. It was organized in 198 3 by a group of musicians whose parents

had known each other on the island. Today they keep alive the traditional

music of Puerto Rico-the Hispanic plena, with its topical lyrics, and the

Afro-Caribbean bomba, with its evocation of plantation culture and Spiri-

tist rites of possession.

But the Pleneros do more than just preserve the old songs. They also

create new ones, itself an old tradition. In Puerto Rico, explained Rivera,

plenas ”were like a newspaper-people would write plenas about what was

happening and take them from town to town.” The Pleneros de la ’21

maintained this tradition as well. “Two days after the Rodney King trial

verdicts” in Los Angeles, he related, “we had a song about it.”

“This is our music, the music of our parents,” Rivera stressed, adding

that the Pleneros’ role was to bring it to their own children, even in the

heart of New York City. On a steamy June Saturday in Central Park,

Puerto Ricans of all ages formed an enthusiastic audience for the Plen-

eros, including teenagers who looked more likely to be singing salsa than

plena. For Nelly Tanco, one of the group’s featured singers, this enthu-

siasm was understandable. “I used to be into salsa myself, but I feel that

in this more traditional music I am more into my country,” she explained.

“When you talk about salsa, it is a mix of everybody’s music, but when

you are talking about traditional music like plena, you are talking about

something as Puerto Rican as rice and beans,” she affirmed. “Put it this

way: We cannot live without rice and beans-and the same is true for our

music.”

But for many Nuyoricans, who grew up in the ghettos of Manhattan

and the Bronx with African-Americans and are often regarded as “blacks”

by a North American society that does not recognize mulattos, rap–it-

self a stepchild of Jamaican dub-is a more natural musical outlet than

plena or even salsa, the popular music of today’s Puerto Rico.

“We were raised in the ghetto, and all our friends was all into hip hop.

614 / Americas

Every street comer there was a jam. So we just got influenced by that and

began to rap, because it was there,” explained Rick “Puerto Rock” Ro-

driguez, lead singer of Latin Empire, a dynamic Nuyorican rap group. “If

we would have been raised in Puerto Rico, we’d probably be singing

salsa.” Although they had been bored as children by the sentimental

boleros of a Daniel Santos that their parents loved, “we don’t dislike salsa

or anything-we love it and we include it into our raps.” This mix was a

natural one for Nuyoricans like Latin Empire’s Anthony “Krazy Taino”

Boston, who “started off speaking Spanglish. I mean Spanish at home,

then all of a sudden I began speaking English at school, and then I started

to adapt to both, and I found myself mixing them both.” The result was

“street jams with a Spanish flavor,” said Rick, describing his “bilingual

rap,” which mixes rhymes in both languages-like reggaeton.

Yet, now that they are “older and wiser,” they are proud of the songs of

their parents, which also show up in their raps. Because “if you lose your cul-

ture,” stressed Tony, “then you gonna be lost in the sauce.” Latin Empire

sees their own raps as a continuation of the Puerto Rican plena tradition, but

in a different context and with a different beat. Rap is like “plena, saying the

story of something that happened in one pueblo,” Rick explained. It was one

reason “the older people give us R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” affirmed Tony, but it

also made the younger Nuyoricans “feel proud of their culture,” Rick

stressed. “Like yeah, that’s right, I’m Puerto Rican and proud.”

Puerto Rican artists and community activists have taken the lead in

this effort to preserve and promote their unique culture in an urban en-

vironment where Nuyoricans are subject to the dual lures of mainstream

Anglo culture and African-American ghetto culture-the first a passport

to assimilation and ascent into the middle class, the second a reflection

of the racism, poverty, and urban problems that both communities share.

The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater-a mobile troupe that offers free

performances at community centers and schools around the city-has

satirized the willingness of upwardly mobile Puerto Ricans to deny their

cultural heritage as the price of assimilation. In The English-Only Restau-

rant no Spanish is spoken, and a ghetto macho who refuses to play by

North of the Border I 6 I 5

these rules is ostracized-until a police raid reveals them to be all “just

Puerto Ricans” in the eyes of Anglo society and their heritage reasserts

itself.

Ecuelecua is a community-based performance group in Manhattan’s

Loisaida, or Lower East Side, which creates plays on themes of everyday

concerns such as domestic violence, which they develop through com-

munity informants and then present as part of a strategy of community

empowerment. “The role of culture in addressing the issues that Puerto

Ricans face in New York is a key one,” argued director Marfa Mar. “It

goes back to the role that the arts have played in Puerto Rican and Latin

American history, which is that of education and bringing people to-

gether to analyze their problems and to celebrate their own power.” Her

codirector, Ben Soto, agreed. “Puerto Ricans are one of the most assim-

ilated of the Latino groups, yet still you’re always an outsider,” he em-

phasized. Culture is “fundamental to the issue of political power, because

the way people see themselves is essential to their feeling capable of

doing things, to feeling that they can move forward.”

But it is not just Puerto Rican artists who are maintaining their cul-

tural traditions and community in New York’s concrete jungle. Ordinary

Nuyoricans share their fierce pride in being “Boricuas” (after the Taino

Indian name for the island) and in their culture and ethnic identity-

“even Puerto Ricans that don’t speak Spanish and aren’t into Spanish

music,” underscored Rick Rodriguez. It is why Puerto Rican Day is an
annual occasion for an outpouring of ethnic pride.

On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, an area shared by Anglo profes-

sionals, African-Americans, and Latinos, the celebrations started the

night before, as Puerto Rican flags sprouted out of the basement apart-

ments of supers and syncopated Caribbean rhythms took over Broadway.

Around the comer from my house, a super had set up a stand selling “I

am Proud to be Puerto Rican” buttons and homemade paste/es de bacaliio,

pastries stuffed with salt codfish. Behind him his friends sat in his door-

way-as their fathers had sat in front of their casitas in Puerto Rico-with

their guitars and maracas and bongo drums, playing “the old songs,”

6 r 6 I Americas

breaking into rakish harmonies, while their wives talked and their chil-

dren danced on the sidewalk. “We are proud to be Puerto Ricans,” he ex-

plained, “and we want everyone in this neighborhood to know that.”

QUISQUEYA HEIGHTS

The plane for Puerto Plata was late and we were the only ones waiting

in the empty airport lounge at Port-au-Prince, so conversation came nat-

urally.Jose was heading home for a visit to San Francisco. “No, not Cali-

fornia,” he laughed, “the Dominican Republic.” I should come and visit,

he said. They had everything there one could want-swimming pools,

restaurants, discos-and he had just built a new house for his mother

with the money he had made in New York. It turned out that he lived in

Washington Heights, my old neighborhood, so we talked about el barrio

and how it had changed: “It’s Quisqueya Heights now, man,” he crowed,

invoking the ancient Taina Indian name for his native island of Hispan-

iola. I didn’t ask him what he did for a living, although his flamboyant

clothes, expensive jewelry, and streetwise style gave me a clue: Most of

the Dominican cocaine dealers in northern Manhattan come from the

little town of San Francisco de Marcoris overlooking the rich Cibao Val-

ley. Their remittances had transformed it from a poor hill town into a

repository of riches.

They had also given its sons an unsavory reputation. In 1991, 160 of

them returned home in closed coffins, victims of New York’s drug wars.

The shooting death by police ofJose “Kiko” Garcia, an alleged cocaine

dealer, in disputed circumstances, had set off days of rioting in Wash-

ington Heights that one Dominican resident called “a mini-Los Ange-

les.” It had not attracted the same national attention or caused compara-

ble losses, but the Dominican riots ofJuly 1992 revealed to many New

Yorkers for the first time the existence of a community that constitutes

the city’s largest group of recent immigrants, yet one that had remained

largely invisible-except for headlines about crack houses and drug wars.

There are narcotics traffickers in the Dominican community of Wash-

North of the Border I 6 r 7

ington Heights, although much of their business is in selling to Anglo

users in cars from suburban New Jersey who cross the nearby George

Washington Bridge.

But few of the over half million Dominicans in New York are drug

dealers. Some are entrepreneurs who have opened supermarkets in neg-

lected ghetto areas. Many more are small businessmen, owners of stores,

bars, and restaurants throughout the city. Most are manual workers in

factories where they earn the minimum wage or less. They are hard-

working immigrants whose remittances to their families in the Domini-

can Republic now constitute that island nation’s largest source of dollars.

They are also one of New York’s fastest-growing ethnic groups .

Like other immigration from the Caribbean Basin, the growing tide

of migrants from the Dominican Republic reflects U.S. involvement in

its internal affairs. It began during the 1960s, a decade of U.S . military

intervention, economic expansion, and political interference. It acceler-

ated during the 1980s, and by 2000 Dominicans were the seventh largest

immigrant group in the United States. It is also one of the most concen-

trated, but in New York, not in Miami, unlike their Caribbean neighbors

from Cuba. By 1985 Dominicans had become the largest foreign-born

group in New York-a status they maintained in 2005.

Unlike the Puerto Rican migrants, the new Dominican community in

New York is largely composed of middle-class people whose educational

and financial resources are greater than those of most of their compatri-

ots. Many are children of small landowners from the countryside who

were seeking ways to supplement their family incomes or to save the

money with which to expand or modernize their family farm. Others had

owned businesses in Santo Domingo and looked to set up their own en-

terprises in New York, or else to accumulate the capital to establish a

business back home. Most were forced to accept work that was beneath

their occupational status in the Dominican Republic, jobs they left as

soon as they had accumulated the capital to open their own businesses.

Today, Dominicans own mami y papi bodegas-mom and pop grocery

stores-throughout New York, and some have gone on from there, fill-

6 r 8 / Americas

ing the niche left vacant by the withdrawal of mainstream businesses

from ghetto areas. C-Town, an expanding chain of owner-operated su-

permarkets, is a good example of this Dominican success. It was created

by Krasdale Foods, a large grocery wholesaler, in 1975 to replace their

customers in the chain stores that had abandoned New York City for the

suburbs. Today, C-Town is a “voluntary association” of 167 franchised

stores with one billion dollars in sales a year. Roughly half of these stores

are owned by Dominicans, who impressed Krasdale president Charles

Krasne, himself the son of an immigrant Russian grocer, with their will-

ingness to work hard and take risks: “They are very industrious and they

stick their necks out,” he asserted. “They came to New York to get rich,

and they succeeded.”9

Mariano Diaz, who went to New York fifteen years ago without any

money and came to earn a six-figure income from his store, is a case in

point. Diaz began by working in his uncle’s bodega in Queens, saving the

money for his own store. In 1982 he bought a bodega on moth Street in

Manhattan, which he sold in 1987 to help finance the C-Town store that

he leased on the ground floor of a building at the northwest corner of

Central Park, on the edge of Harlem. Dominican owner-operators like

Mariano Diaz manage the stores themselves, work six-day weeks and

twelve-hour days and double the normal profit margins. Diaz’s store sales

exceed four million dollars a year, part of the more than one billion dol-

lars in groceries sold by Dominican storeowners in New York annually.

Bodegas and supermarkets may be emblematic of the Dominican road

to riches, but they are not the only route. Inwood, at the northern tip of

Manhattan, is honeycombed with stores and services whose names and

owners reveal their Dominican origins. Tucked in between Rosa’s Bar

and a pool hall in the shadow of the elevated subway line, El Lina looks

from the outside like so many other small Latin American restaurants in

New York-a space divided between a counter and a table area, clean but

modest, with plastic flowers and tablecloths and tile floors. But to

Onesimo Quesada and his brother Santiago, it is the start of their Amer-

ican dream. Following in the footsteps of an elder brother who had mi-

North of the Border I 6 I 9

grated in 1981, they came to New York from Santiago, the Dominican

Republic’s second largest city. There they had trained under their father,

the head chef in El Pez Dorado, or the Golden Fish, honored in 1991 as

the country’s best restaurant. But after sixteen years, they had little to

show for their labors except the skills they had learned, and little chance

of going further in their own country. So they decided to come to the

United States to open a restaurant of their own. “There is more oppor-

tunity here,” Onesimo, the head waiter, explained as he served plates of

rice, red beans, and fried plantains that the New York Times has described

as “an essay in Caribbean aesthetics.” 10 He served us with a flourish

learned in more elegant surroundings, but with a pride in his food and a

confidence in his future. “This restaurant is just a beginning,” he con-

fided. “Someday we will have a restaurant in New York like El Pez Do-

rado.” For the Quezadas, the United States of America remains the land
of opportunity.

During the 1990s, Dominicans elected their first city and state legis-

lators. Then, in 1998, they had something else to celebrate: Sammy

Sosa’s 66 home runs and most valuable player award in America’s Na-

tional Pastime. Sosa’s smiling face replaced drug dealer mug shots as the

image of Dominicans in the national consciousness, and New York

Mayor Rudy Giuliani presented the Dominican baseball star with the

keys to the city after a tickertape parade up the “Canyon of Heroes.”

Four years later, the Yankees paid a record $2 52 million to bring another

MVP Dominican slugger, Alex Rodriguez, to star in the Big Apple. Do-
minicans had arrived in “America.”

LATINOS

The United States attracted more immigrants during the 1980s than in

any previous decade. They came from all over the world to “the land of

liberty,” but almost half came from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Mexico accounted for nearly half of these 3. 5 million legal immigrants,

with the Dominican Republic providing the next largest American con-

620 / Americas

tingent, followed by El Salvador and Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia,

and Guyana. But many of those who settled in the United States did so

illegally and a count of their numbers would increase these official totals.

In New York, a city that historically has been the gateway to America

for immigrants, these recent arrivals have transformed its neighbor-

hoods, creating a “new New York” very different from the old. The 2000

census documented a “Hispanic” population of New York City of nearly

2.2 million, but this is an underestimate. Many New Yorkers from Latin

America and the Caribbean entered the United States illegally and are

reluctant to be counted for fear of being deported. Guesstimates, more-

over, are part of a political numbers game that makes any statistic suspect,

as the distribution of power and resources depends upon the numbers

that are accepted.
Today Hispanic-Americans are New York’s largest minority, account-

ing for 2 7 percent of its population. New York has twice as many Puerto

Ricans as San Juan, almost 800,000, making them the city’s largest eth-

nic group. It also has over half a million Dominicans. Since 1990, how-

ever, Mexicans have been the fastest-growing Latin American group in

New York, bringing their enumerated population to over 125,000 in

2000, along with more than rno,ooo Ecuadorians, almost 80,000 Colom-

bians, some 60,000 Cubans, and substantial numbers of Central Ameri-

cans. In addition to these Spanish-speaking Americans, New York is also

home to a growing community of Brazilians, more than 200,000

Haitians, and more than half a million West Indians (now a quarter of the

city’s Black population), most of whom are Jamaicans but with nearly

90,000 from Trinidad and Tobago and with the smaller islands repre-

sented as well. Together they have made New York the world’s largest

Caribbean city, not only turning Washington Heights into Quisqueya

Heights, but also transforming Brooklyn’s Crown Heights into a West

Indian “island,” whose annual Carnival parade attracts a million people.

It is in the borough of Queens that the new New York is most clearly

on display. Here, Koreans and Cambodians, Russians and Jamaicans live

cheek by jowl with Latinos in neighborhoods where an elementary

North of the Border I 62 r

school like Corona’s P.S. 19 may have children from forty-seven coun-

tries, including virtually all the Latin American republics. “We are a lit-

tle OAS,” quipped the school’s principal, Dr. Barbara Miles, herself the

daughter of West Indian immigrants.

This multicultural mosaic is visible in the street signs and audible in

the accents of passersby. It is also savored in the great variety of foods and

restaurants available in Queens. “You can see the melting pot in the

restaurants-Argentine and Uruguayan, Colombian and Dominican,

Peruvian and Ecuadoran,” explained actor John Leguizamo, who lived in

Jackson Heights during the 1980s. Today, the best Argentine chorizo

sausages and meat pies in New York are to be found in Jackson Heights,

home to the largest Argentine community in North America, most of

them white middle-class professionals.

But Argentines are only one of the many groups from Latin America

and the Caribbean who have made Queens their new home and the new

New York an inter-American mosaic. There is a five-block stretch along

Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights that contains no fewer than ten

Colombian restaurants. Underneath the elevated subway tracks, store-

fronts advertise delivery services to the families left behind in Bogota and

Baranquilla, Cali and Medellin. A few blocks farther into Corona, the

neighborhood becomes Dominican and the sound of the Spanish and

smell of the food changes. Here, a bottinica selling herbal remedies and

statues of Afro-Caribbean santos competes for attention with Blockbuster

Video. In the other direction are polyglot neighborhoods, with Ja-

maicans and Koreans, Peruvians and Filipinos mixed with Mexicans and

Ecuadorians, in addition to older groups of Greeks and Italians. It was in

such a multicultural neighborhood that Leguizamo spent his teenage

years in the 1980s. “School was like Benetton,” he recalled. “You’d look

around the class and there were so many different colors and faces.”

Most of those faces were from Latin America, but “it was different

growing up in Queens than in Miami, where there is one big group of

Hispanics-the Cubans,” he underscored. “I grew up in a mixed neigh-

borhood-even among the Latinos. There were a lot of Puerto Ricans

622 / Americas

and Colombians, but there were also Salvadorans and Argentines, and

some Hondurans and lot of Ecuadorians. And now there are many Do-

minicans and Mexicans as well.” Though these groups all spoke Spanish,

within Latin America they stressed their separate national identities, with

their racial differences and claims of superiority. In Queens, on the other

hand, “you saw the differences, but it didn’t matter. In Queens, we all felt

drawn to each other and there was an instant bond, because of this lan-

guage and culture that we share,” he explained. “People started to iden-

tify not as Colombians or Puerto Ricans but as Latinos.”

The result was the emergence of a new synthetic Latino identity and

a new syncretic popular culture. Leguizamo’s friends danced to reggae

and rap, as well as to cumbia and tango, merengue and salsa. It is salsa,
which cannot be identified with any one country of the Hispanic

Caribbean but draws on the musical traditions of all of them, plus the di-

verse Hispanic communities in the United States, that best expresses this

new “Latino” culture.

Leguizamo, the child of a Puerto Rican father and a Colombian

mother, exemplifies this Latino identity, which he explores in perform-

ance pieces, like his prize-winning Mambo Mouth, with its focus on the

working-class and street people of his Queens adolescence, or its suc-

cessor, Spic-O-Rama, which examines the middle-class Latinos of to,jay.

Mambo Mouth-Salsa Mouth might have been a better title for his wide-

ranging and pungent skits-he satirizes a rogues’ gallery of Latino types,

from an older generation Cuban talk-show host bragging about his sex

appeal to a teenage Puerto Rican street kid looking for his first sexual en-

counter, and from a failed Colombian “Inca God Dad” to a successful

Latino “Crossover King” who offers seminars on how to assimilate-and

become Japanese.

But his most poignant and explicitly political skit is the confrontation

between an illegal Mexican immigrant and an I.N.S. official of Domini-

can origin who is implementing Anglo laws and deporting him. To the

Anglo majority in his audience, Leguizamo has his Pepe Vasquez proclaim

in Spanish-accented English: “Come on … it’s not like I’m stealing or !iv-

North of the Border I 62 3

ing off you good people’s taxes. I’m doing the shit jobs Americans don’t

want … Who the hell wants to work for $2.25 an hour picking toxic

pesticide-coated grapes?” But his message to the large Latino minority

watching his show is expressed in Vasquez’s appeal in Spanish to his Do-

minican interrogator: “Somos de la misma sangrita. Los latinos debemos ser

unidos y jamds seremos vencidos”-“We are of the same blood. Latinos ought

to be united and if we are, we will never be defeated.”

“And I truly believe that,” Leguizamo affirmed. “The characters in my

show are representatives of the community. They are prototypes.”

Leguizamo explained: “America may not realize it yet but Latin proto-

types are being created right now-and not just by me. It is these mambo

kings and salsa queens, Aztec lords and Inca princesses, every Hernan-

dez and Fernandez, whom this country will one day come to understand

and respect.”

John Leguizamo’s one-man show not only won critical praise, it also

played to sold-out theaters and was featured on HBO. It is only one of

the many signs that Latino culture is coming of age within the United

States and winning increasing appreciation among non-Hispanics as

well. In 1990, Oscar Hijuelos won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The

Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, with its nostalgic evocation of the world

of the first Latin crossover dream, the Cuban musicians of the postwar

era.

In 1998, the year “Nuevo Latino” cuisine became the rage in New

York City, a symbolic shift took place. The Manhattan restaurant Main

Street became Calle Ocho, the main street of Miami’s Little Havana, the

home of its hot new chef, Alex Garcia. Its menu followed suit, exchang-

ing the bland “comfort food” of main street for the strong flavors of Latin

American dishes and Caribbean spices. Garcia, who was born in Cuba,

raised in Miami, and trained in New York’s famed Culinary Institute, cre-

ates sophisticated dishes inspired by the entire region. He is clear about

the roots of his success. “I cook Nuevo Latino cuisine,” he stressed, “but

I also serve rice and beans.” 11 If Americans are what they eat, Latinos

have won acceptance at last.

624 / Americas

The risks-as well as the richness-of multicultural fusion is the cen-

tral subject of Mexican poet-performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena,

whose many Mexican masks reveal the ambiguities of North-South cul-

tural tensions that are at once destructive and creative. More self-

consciously intellectual than Leguizamo, G6mez-Pefia focuses on the

border as a metaphor for U.S.-Latin American relations, as an obstacle

for Mexican immigrants like his family, and as an opportunity for the

United States. “There is a great new fusion taking place,” he argued, “and

I think that syncretism is as much a part of U.S. culture as it is in Latin

America.” 12 Along both sides of the two-thousand-mile U.S.-Mexico

frontier, a new “border culture” has emerged, a fusion of both cultures

into a new popular culture that will enrich both countries. Los Lobos,

the award-winning Chicano band from Los Angeles that plays every-

thing from rancheras to rhythm and blues, is one example. The murals

of East L.A. artist Judy Baca, which draw on both the Mexican muralists

and the WP.A. populist tradition while adding something uniquely Chi-

cano, are another.

For G6mez-Pefia the task is for Latinos to “rediscover” their Amer-

ica and for Anglos to understand the Latino experience of North Amer-

ica. It is a goal that brings border art into the mainstream of the U.S. de-

bate over bilingualism and multiculturalism and what it means to be an

“American.”

AMERICANS

When I was growing up in the Inwood section of Washington Heights

at the north end of Manhattan Island during the postwar years, it was an

ethnic mosaic of Irish and Jews, Germans and Greeks, Italians and Ar-

menians. Most of my schoolmates were children or grandchildren of im-

migrants, who were trying to make it into the middle class and fulfill

their American dream in New York City.

Today my old neighborhood seems changed. The language heard

most frequently on the streets is Spanish, as are the signs on the stores.

North of the Border I 62 5

Most residents are from the Dominican Republic, part of the complex

wave of migration, legal and illegal, from south of our borders that has

transformed New York City-and the United States-during recent
decades.

Below the Hispanic surface, though, much about my old neighbor-

hood remains the same. Most of these new neighbors are also hard-

working immigrants determined to make good in the United States. The

Irish bars now have Spanish names and the insistent rhythms of

merengue have replaced the lilting strains of Celtic harps in their juke-

boxes, but they remain local watering holes whose music defines their

ethnicity. The kosher grocery stores are now bodegas selling “tropical

products,” but they still lend immigrant tables a nostalgic taste of home.

The neighborhood still functions as a way station of integration for im-

migrants on the way up into the lower middle class, and my old elemen-

tary school is still seen as their children’s first step in that direction. Much

has been written about the new wave of immigrants from Latin America

and the Caribbean, but how different are they from the earlier waves of
European immigrants?

Until recently, the “making of the United States” out of a “land of im-

migrants” was a linear story of progressive “Americanization,” in which

the immigrants’ acquisition of English-language skills and educational

credentials were their passports to success. Its popular counterpart was

the ideology of the “melting pot,” in which immigrants lost their ethnic

characteristics and identities and emerged as “Americans.”

In the wake of the ethnic revival that followed the black consciousness

movement of the r96os, historians are questioning whether assimilation

was ever as linear a process as an earlier generation believed, and arguing

that the melting pot was always more ideal than real. In addition, Latino

intellectuals like dramatist Ben Soto have criticized the melting pot as “a

dangerous place,” where Puerto Ricans “just become sludge at the bot-

tom.” Notions of “ethnic resilence” now shape scholarly studies, while

the “multicultural mosaic” has replaced the “melting pot” of assimilation

as the dominant metaphor of public policy and political debate.

626 / Americas

Although this revolution in conventional wisdoms reflects a reevalu-

ation of the experience of earlier immigrant groups, the seeming resist-

ance to assimilation by the new wave of immigrants from Latin America

and the Caribbean has become a driving force. Among Latinos, the ini-

tial formulation of this alternative vision emerged from Chicanos influ-

enced by the civil rights movement, but the notion of “La Raza”-a Mex-

ican fusion of Spaniard and Indian-was more a reaction to failure than

a recipe for success.

Among Latinos it was Miami’s Cubans who first demonstrated that

success in the United States could be a product not of assimilation but of

banding together and resisting its lures. In South Florida they created an

ethnic enclave in which a knowledge of Spanish and an understanding of

Latin American culture became central to economic and political

achievement. “There’s a good bit of bad feeling about that,” Philip

Thomas asserted. This “bad feeling” found an expression in Thomas’s

Dade Americans United, which for a time succeeded in making English

the sole legal language of Miami’s Dade County. But legislation did lit-

tle to alter Miami’s bilingual and multicultural character.

Thomas blames the Miami Herald’s Spanish-language newspaper for

“encouraging people to retain their own language and culture almost to

the exclusion of English.” For him it was a case of American institutions

adjusting to immigrants where it ought to be the other way around, as

had been the case in the past. For the Herald, it was an effort “to be re-

sponsive and sensitive to what the community needs,” according to Car-

los Verdecia. “Everybody thought that Cubans would assimilate, that

they would start reading in English and there would be no need for a

Spanish-language publication,” the editor recounted. What happened

was “quite the opposite. El Nuevo had to be launched as an expanded

newspaper in 1987 to meet the needs” of a new wave of immigrants who

“were more comfortable in Spanish.” It is this continual flow of new im-

migrants that sustains Miami’s Spanish language and culture-as it does

that of Los Angeles and New York.

For Anglos such as Philip Thomas, this is a sign that Hispanics are re-

North of the Border I 62 7

fusing to assimilate. Carlos Verdecia disagrees: “Hispanics and Cubans

feel that they are as American as apple pie,” he insisted, and despite Anglo

fears, second-generation Cubans speak English well. “In fact, we are the

ones to worry,” argued Verdecia, “because our children lose their Span-

ish”-a worry supported by recent studies. Thomas’s concern was mis-

placed, he concluded. “I don’t think there should be a fear of Miami los-

ing its English language, but I do think that it is so much richer for

having so many different cultures and so many different languages.”

The Cuban success in a bilingual and multicultural Miami may be too

much a product of a particular time and place to serve as a model for

other immigrant groups. Elsewhere, the demand for bilingual education

and advocacy of a multicultural mosaic reflect frustration at the power-

lessness of even sizable Latino populations and the failure of schools to

stem the alarming dropout rates of Latino children, which augur ill for
their future in a society stratified by education.

Yet Anglos like Philip Thomas are not the only ones worried about

the multicultural trend. Linda Chavez, a director of the U.S. Civil Rights

Commission under President Ronald Reagan, has attacked bilingual ed-

ucation and multiculturalism and argued for assimilation out of a con-

cern for both Hispanic success and U.S. unity. Chavez sees bilingualism

as an understandable response to high Latino dropout rates, but argues

that “the results are counterproductive and lead to increased segregation

and prejudice.” She is concerned that Hispanic youngsters spend “their

entire school lives” in bilingual programs, leaving them unprepared for

the English-speaking society outside. She also worries that there are

communities in the United States where no English is spoken and criti-

cizes Spanish-language ballots for U.S. citizens who are supposed to

know English, transforming these communities into political enclaves as

well. Chavez defends the older notion of assimilation, which she recog-

nizes “has become a dirty word,” arguing that Hispanics can assimilate

“and still celebrate their own traditions within their families.” She warns

that “if we persist in emphasizing our separateness rather than our same-

ness, then we can only expect that race and ethnicity will be a major

628 / Americas

source of conflict in coming decades.” 13 In California, these concerns

came together in 1998 in Proposition 227, a successful ballot initiative

that banned most bilingual education, winning many Hispanic votes with

the argument that it doesn’t work.

Dr. Barbara Miles, the principal of P.S. 19 in New York, a city where

bilingual education is mandated for all children who lack the fluency to

learn in English, disagrees. The great majority of the students in her

Queens school come from Latin America and half of the kindergarten

classes are bilingual, with children learning thematic units in both Spanish

and English. She had received angry phone calls demanding: “Why are we

accommodating the needs of the Spanish-speaking children?” But Dr.

Miles argued that “research demonstrates quite clearly that children need

to be taught in their native language first and then we can transfer those

skills to English.” She was convinced that bilingual education worked: At

P.S. 19, by fifth grade only one bilingual class remained to serve recently

arrived older children. All the other children were now able to learn in En-

glish. “That is our focus,” Miles stressed. “We want them to become

English-speaking because they live in an English-speaking country.”

Like their parents, few of whom are U.S . citizens, the children in P.S.

19 are proud of the country they came from, a pride that P.S. 19 en-

courages through activities that “celebrate the diversity” of its student

population. In one bilingual class, students choreographed and cos-

tumed a play in which they presented information about their countries

of origin. “We celebrate the independence day of the Dominican Re-

public,” where most of the school’s children come from, related Dr.

Miles. The children “told us about the history of the Dominican Re-

public, and it was very heartwarming when they sang the national an-

them of the Dominican Republic.”

Yet, for Miles and her staff, “another aim is for all of the children to

be aware that they are or will be U .S. citizens. We pledge allegiance to

the flag every day,” she stressed, “and every assembly begins with the

singing of ‘America the Beautiful.'” The fifth-grade graduation, the cul-

North of the Border I 629

minating event for P.S. 19 students, featured patriotic songs sung by a

United Nations of young voices.

Even the kindergarten graduation celebrated the children’s first steps

toward becoming “Americans,” yet without losing their identities as Do-

minicans or Colombians. Watching their children create a ceremony in

both English and Spanish, Adolfo Avila was proud that his daughter had

“learned a lot at school,” but also “proud that she speaks both languages.”

So was Silvia Baiz, who was not yet a U.S. citizen, but was “very proud

to live in this country” and felt “one hundred percent American. And,”

she stressed, “all my children feel totally American.”

The presence of a large and growing group of immigrants who speak

a foreign language, take pride in their distinctive culture, and insist on

bilingualism and a multicultural society has sparked alarm among many

in the United States-as was the case with nativist reactions to previous

immigrant waves. Former Colorado governor and vice-presidential can-

didate Richard Lamm articulated these fears when he wrote in The Im-

migration Time Bomb: The Frag;menting of America: ”Increasingly, the po-

litical power of … Hispanics is being used not to support assimilation

but to advance ‘ethnic pride’ in belonging to a different culture.” 14 Nor

was Lamm the only prominent U.S. critic of Hispanic migration. In

2004, influential Harvard professor Samuel Huntington charged that

“the persistent flow of Hispanic immigrants” was the biggest threat to

“America’s national identity.”15

There are some special characteristics of the recent wave of immi-

grants from Latin America and the Caribbean. There is more return mi-

gration and transnational communities, a reflection of shorter distances

and low air fares-although post-September 11 security measures have

made this more difficult. These new neighbors also arrived during the

era of the “new ethnicity,” a time of revived ethnic awareness among all

hyphenated-Americans. There was greater demand for bilingual educa-

tion, and educators were more receptive to the need of immigrant chil-

dren for special programs to ease their integration into U.S. society.

630 I Americas

There has been more integration than assimilation perhaps among first-

generation immigrants, and greater reluctance among some of them to

become citizens.

But nativist concerns are misplaced. Bilingual education accelerates

both integration and assimilation. As in the past, assimilation has been a

gradual process, but the second generation of recent immigrants, U.S.

citizens at birth, speak better English and are more assimilated than their

parents. There is every reason to believe that succeeding generations will

continue the pattern of progressive assimilation-though with a greater

complexity and ethnic pride than may have been true for immigrants

who arrived in an era when such ethnic retention seemed less legitimate.

Even the Hispanic ethnic pride and politics that Lamm warns against

have both precedents in the past and a different meaning than he lends

them. In the past, such reaffirmation of ethnic identities was a step to-

ward the social and political integration of European immigrant groups,

many of which still vote for candidates of their ethnic origin. There is

every indication that the same is true of the new ethnic politics within

communities of Spanish American origin, who are learning the value of

citizenship and democracy by using them to defend their interests.

In 2004, Latino voters in Colorado and Florida assured the election

of two Hispanic U.S. Senators-a Mexican-American Democrat and a

Cuban-American Republican. The importance of Hispanic-American

votes was clear in the national campaigns of both parties in that election.

In its wake, George W. Bush named Mexican-American Alberto Gonza-

lez to be the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general and is widely ex-

pected to appoint the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.

At the local level too, Hispanics are participating more in politics and

becoming active citizens. In Los Angeles, experiences of the power of

the vote persuaded Mexicans in Bell Gardens to become U.S. citizens.

Across the country, legislation restricting social services for non-citizens

is having a similar impact. In 1998, moreover, Latino voters turned out

in record numbers to punish California Republicans for initiatives ban-

ning affirmative action and bilingual education and ending public serv-

North of the Border I 63 r

ices (including education) for illegal immigrants. Few communities have

learned to play the U.S. political game as well as Miami’s Cuban com-

munity, but Chicanos and Haitians have tried to repeat their success in

influencing U.S. policy toward their countries of origin. In many ways

the newer immigrants are following in the footsteps of the old, who

learned to use their numbers and political influence to promote the in-

terests of their communities.

What is perhaps new is the question posed by these Latin American

communities to the larger U.S. society: Why do we have to give up our

culture of origin in order to become “American”-in a melting pot that

never really melted? It is a question that this nation of immigrants would

do well to ponder. In the century of the global village, in which interna-:

tional distances are shrinking but economic competition is increasing, an

insistence on “English Only” seems both anachronistic and self-

defeating. Miami’s Cuban community has demonstrated how a bilingual

and multicultural environment can be an economic advantage in a new

world order of mobile capital and global sourcing. In Miami, where His-

panics have won the battle over bilingual education, the goal of the

school system is now bilingual fluency for all students. Within the pro-

posed hemispheric free-trade area, a knowledge of Spanish and Por-

tuguese and an understanding and appreciation of the cultures of Latin

America and the Caribbean will be indispensable for North Americans.

It is an argument for promoting a bilingual and multicultural society

within the United States instead of insisting on assimilation as the price

of acceptance.

The vibrant cultures that these immigrants bring with them can only

enrich the culture of the United States. The strong arms, needed skills,

and feisty entrepreneurship of immigrants from Latin America and the

Caribbean have already contributed to this country’s economic progress,

helping to rejuvenate decaying cities and to maintain declining indus-

tries. Latinos have participated increasingly in this country’s politics and

contributed their artistic traditions and talents as well. There is every

reason to believe that their children and grandchildren will play increas-

632 I Americas

ing roles in this country’s future, just as the children and grandchildren

of European immigrants have done.

On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, a “Wall of Honor” bears the

names of hundreds of thousands of European immigrants who entered

the United States through this gateway to the “land ofliberty” during the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and helped to make this

country the land of opportunity. The recent wave of immigrants from

the Americas have arrived by more diverse routes-they have landed at

airports, traversed dangerous straits in small boats, and crossed porous

borders-and the site for their monument is less clear. Yet, a century

from now they too should merit a monument to their courage in immi-

grating and to their contribution to their new country.

The United States has always prided itself on being a land of immi-

grants, but historically its citizens have also been ambivalent about the

most recent immigrant wave. In the twenty-first century, people of Latin
American and Caribbean origin will be the largest minority in the United

States, which will have to come to terms with the fact that they are not

immigrants but “Americans”-citizens of both the country and the

hemisphere that we all share.

EPILOGUE

Latin America and the Caribbean
in the Twenty-First Century:

A New Millennium?

As Latin America and the Caribbean confront the twenty-first century,

the question is whether it will mean merely another century, or will also

usher in a new millennium in the lives of the people of the region. The

future may be hazardous to predict, but one prediction is safe to hazard:

the face of Latin America and the Caribbean will continue to change in

the twenty-first century.

The problem is to discern which of the late twentieth century changes

will continue into the new century-and which have run their course.

Many of the long term trends in the region-such as rural migration to

the cities or the growing roles of women outside the home-are likely to

continue in the new millennium. The same is true for the creative trans-

formation of religion and popular culture that this book has explored. Al-

though these shifts may be affected by government policies, they reflect

deeper historical processes in the economies, societies and cultures of

Latin America and the Caribbean.

Other changes of the late twentieth century represent the decisions of

policymakers and electorates, often in response to the failed policies of

the past. Some of the most dramatic and important changes have been in

economic policy. Throughout the region, policymakers have turned

away from protectionist, inward-looking models such as import substi-

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