Caribbean Awaits Reagan in Shadows Cast by Monroe

On Dec. 2, 1823, in his annual message to the U.S. Congress, President James Monroe clearly enunciated what has become one of the guiding principles of American foreign policy. In essence, what is now referred to as the Monroe Doctrine stipulated that “any further colonization by European powers in the Western Hemisphere” would be opposed by the United States, and any “interposition in the affairs of Western Hemisphere nations for the purpose of oppressing them or controlling . . . in any other manner their destiny” would be considered an unfriendly act toward the United States.

However, the specific U.S. application of the doctrine subsequently assumed something of the character of political tutelage, which was quite naturally resented by many of those whose protection it ostensibly sought to guarantee. Furthermore, the interpretation of Monroe’s doctrine by other Presidents, notably beginning with Theodore Roosevelt, was made sufficiently elastic to provide legitimacy for military and other interventions whenever U.S. interests were presumed to be in some jeopardy. Inevitably, to secure those interests, it became a practice to buttress corrupt, incompetent, repressive and even brutal oligarchies, simply because they ensured, by hook or crook, “political stability” as perceived by the United States.

It became difficult--especially in light of America’s own colonial experience--to reconcile professed U.S. principles of “freedom, democracy and social justice” with what was actually practiced. The Monroe Doctrine seemed to have evolved into the United States’ assertion of predominance throughout the Western Hemisphere.

The current President has couched that “manifest destiny” in somewhat more persuasive and humanitarian rhetoric. Ronald Reagan has conjured a picture of the many diverse strands of humanity that occupy the Hemisphere as having a compatibility of interests and a mutuality of needs. He has further invoked the image of a community of fellow-Americans, bound together by shared ideals and aspirations, in a brotherhood that stretches from pole to pole.

There is, however, a contending view that the President’s heady rhetoric for the Hemisphere obscures a somewhat nebulous and disturbing vision of the Caribbean as his “backyard fishing pond,” with all that this entails.

It would be very much at variance with any balanced perspective not to concede that what President Reagan sees as Soviet-backed and Cuban-managed subversive and insurgent activity in the region is conceivably actuated by motives no less sinister than those ascribed to his Administration by its more abrasive critics.

All of this is called to mind as the President prepares to visit Grenada. That small island was the crucible for a Marxist-Leninist experiment that eventually cannibalized itself. Ironically, this appears to have happened against a background of scrambled signals between Havana and Moscow, in which the left finger didn’t seem to know what the left hand was doing.

The hapless Grenadian folk paid dearly to find out what it meant for a small paranoiac and ideologically blinkered clique to have got its hand on the lever of power, its grip on the channels of communication, its finger on the trigger and its heel on the neck of the people.

In context, this was not a new situation. Nor is it unprecedented that intervention and possible domination of the affairs of a supposedly sovereign state might assume surreptitious and clandestine guises, which may be no less reprehensible or indefensible than the most overt and blatant forms. The Caribbean has long been the cockpit for European feuds to be played out in blood. And it has long been the province where metropolitan powers wring their wealth from the sweat of other men’s brows, leaving them to be the proverbial “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

Now comes the Reagan Administration with a strategy for dealing with the politically unsettled state of the region: the Caribbean Basin Initiative, a package of aid, trade concessions and incentives for American investors. If the CBI has sunk to the bottom of Washington’s policy agenda, as some seem to think, this would not only raise serious questions about a credible U.S. Caribbean policy; it also could appear as more of the same historic subterfuge.

Throughout, President Reagan expresses his policies in terms of “freedom.” One might add that freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from hunger and freedom from destitution are probably not enshrined in any constitution. Yet in their absence all other freedoms must necessarily rest on shifting sand.

If only for this reason, one expects that the prospect of collapsing economics and the attendant chaos should be of more than rhetorical concern to Washington.

Today Grenada is (shall we say) within the sphere of U.S. influence, and the Caribbean sea lanes are free for U.S. trade and traffic. Yet for the benighted Caribbean peoples, the future is veiled in obscurity. They sit and wonder what must happen to them next to draw Washington’s attention. And then, will it be the attention of a partner in development and democracy, or that of a patronizing bully offering protection for a price?

Mr. Reagan is coming for a visit, and we sit in the lap of the gods.