Lone Superpower’s Shadow Darkens the Frustration of Caribbean Nations

Freed from a Soviet threat in its own backyard, the U.S. appears to have shifted its foreign policy in the Caribbean from artful diplomacy to near-arrogance, alienating many of its closest neighbors on such crucial issues as drug trafficking, immigration and even communism itself, according to analysts and political leaders in the region.

As a result, despite its clout as the world’s sole superpower, Washington has failed to carry out its policies in some of the small but strategic nations--once-staunch friends that are now forming their own alliances.

From refusing to extradite murder suspects and accused drug dealers to the United States to renewing diplomatic ties with Cuba, the island states have stood firm against what is often seen as post-Soviet insensitivity or even outright bullying by Washington.

“During the Cold War, the United States appeared to be more concerned about the feelings of countries in this part of the world,” said Louis Tull, a member of Barbados’ Parliament who served as foreign minister in the 1980s. “When there was a Soviet alternative, the United States had to operate with a lot of finesse.

“Now there’s only one superpower, so they don’t have to worry about that anymore. There has been a certain heavy-handedness by the United States toward its friends in the Caribbean.”

But Tull and other politicians in the region balked at suggestions that the United States’ attitude in the region has provoked an era of Caribbean defiance.

“It’s not a question of defiance,” he said. “We’re not defying anybody. We’re asserting.”

Tiny Countries See Uncle Sam as Goliath

The pattern of post-Soviet arrogance by a Cold War-winning U.S. repeats itself in other vital regions, most notably Europe, where the United States’ oldest and closest friends view America as increasingly unpredictable, detached and self-absorbed. But nowhere else is the David-and-Goliath image as sharply etched as in the Caribbean, where a handful of nations, among the world’s tiniest, have to live intimately close to the giant, in its shadow.

One of the reasons analysts cite for Washington’s foreign policy failures even in small nations close to home is leverage lost through sharply diminished U.S. aid in recent years.

But another key factor has been the U.S. government’s own competing interests, policies that have ripped deeply into the economies of these nations and left their leaders confused and distrustful.

The region’s vital banana trade, for example, was devastated after Washington won a World Trade Organization ruling in 1997 that abolished the Caribbean’s preferential export deals with Europe. In representing the interests of U.S. banana companies, Washington left many Caribbean allies embittered.

St. Lucia Prime Minister Kenny Anthony said the U.S. government’s “lead role in the challenge to our banana marketing regime has damaged our own people’s confidence in [Washington’s] declarations of friendship.” Last week, Caribbean Community leaders meeting in St. Lucia even requested help from South African President Nelson Mandela, asking him to help convince Washington not to be the “main attacker” of their banana industry.

Anthony and other Caribbean leaders have also cited new U.S. immigration laws as a major irritant that has hardened the region’s attitudes toward Washington. Those laws are flooding their countries with deportees, many of them criminals who are now sent back to their home countries after serving minimum sentences in U.S. prisons.

The United States’ immigration policy, Anthony said, “is eroding the bridges between our peoples.”

In Washington’s defense, senior U.S. diplomats stressed recent foreign policy successes in the region over the failures.

After years of negotiations, for example, Washington finally has won strategic agreements with every key Caribbean nation along the heavily trafficked cocaine route from Colombia through the region to the U.S. The agreements permit U.S. counter-narcotics forces to operate freely in hot pursuit of drug suspects through the countries’ territorial waters.

But even those treaties, known as ship-rider agreements, cost the U.S. precious political capital here. In Barbados, which saw the treaties as blatant violations of its sovereignty and had held out for compromises along with Jamaica, bitterness lingers.

Ivelaw Griffith, a professor at Florida International University and author of a recent book titled “Drugs and Security in the Caribbean; Sovereignty Under Siege,” attributed much of Washington’s heavy-handed approach on the drug front to the fall of the Soviet Bloc.

“The absence of competition always causes arrogance and a little bit of impunity,” he said.

Envoys Say American Attitudes Changing

Senior U.S. diplomats in the region agreed that Washington has been guilty of insensitivity in the Caribbean in the years since the Communist Bloc collapsed. Concerns that a Moscow-backed Cuba or Nicaragua would export communism to its neighbors disappeared along with the USSR, as did the apparent need for delicate diplomacy to prevent communism’s spread.

But those diplomats insisted that such attitudes are now changing.

The turning point, they said, came at a summit in Barbados last year when President Clinton was bombarded by Caribbean leaders’ concerns.

“I think there has been a real change in U.S. attitude since the president’s visit last year,” said one U.S. diplomat in the region, who asked not to be named. “One of the most important things that’s emerging is we’re engaging in dialogue with these countries.

“There’s a new awareness that we need to work in genuine cooperation and not dictating our policy.”

Caribbean analysts and senior officials are not so certain.

“The agenda for the United States with the nations of the Caribbean appears to be more unilateral than bilateral. More often than not, it’s a one-way ticket,” said Dominican Republic political analyst Anibal de Castro.

“The United States has lost a lot of ground in its relations with Latin America in general,” added Miguel Guerrero, a Dominican political analyst and former presidential spokesman.

Islands Form Other Alliances

As a result, most nations in the region are looking elsewhere--and among themselves--to forge strategic alliances that are beyond the reach of the U.S.

“We’re trying to open other windows,” De Castro said. “The American window is still important. But we’re realizing it’s not the only window.”

The most dramatic illustration: An increasing number of Caribbean nations are breaking through U.S.-imposed Cold War barriers that stood between them and Cuba. Many are reopening their embassies in Communist-ruled Havana, despite U.S. pressure against doing so.

Several Caribbean leaders have paid official visits to Cuban President Fidel Castro in the past year, and others have invited him to their countries. All have stepped up trade with Cuba. Together with the European nations that once ruled most of these islands, they have left Washington virtually alone in its policy to isolate Cuba.

These trends are reflected in Africa, the Pacific and Latin America as well.

At a meeting in Barbados earlier this month, an alliance representing 70 African, Caribbean and Pacific nations from Trinidad to Togo to Tonga formally accepted Cuba as a full member, and the nearly two dozen nations involved in the Caribbean Community are expected to follow suit.

So far, Washington has been largely taciturn in the face of the wave of recognition of a Communist foe it has sought to isolate for nearly four decades. When pressed, U.S. diplomats simply say they do not believe that policies of “constructive engagement” toward Cuba--which many governments cite as a reason for their ties--will advance democracy on the island.

Extradition Raises Sovereignty Questions

On the emotionally charged issue of extradition, however, Washington has taken a more assertive tack--one that continues to alienate some of its allies. But so too have those allies taken a more aggressive stance, often to their own detriment.

Dozens of fugitives from U.S. justice--many of them allegedly violent criminals--live free and easy in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Barbados and even tiny St. Kitts and Nevis after their courts ruled against U.S. extradition efforts in the name of sovereignty.

Publicly, U.S. diplomats voice deep respect for the sovereignty of these nations, and U.S. prosecutors use their court systems to seek the legal return of suspects. But when they lose such cases, U.S. law enforcement agencies have sought to circumvent the sovereignty issue.

In several recent cases, U.S. authorities have simply waited until a fugitive moved from an uncooperative country to a more pliant neighbor, where the suspect was seized on arrival.

One such case triggered widespread protest this spring in Barbados, a former British colony with a widely respected judicial system. A Syrian-born Barbadian businessman wanted in Puerto Rico on bribery charges was arrested in Barbados in 1995. But a local magistrate denied the U.S. extradition request and freed him; the crimes were committed in Barbados, outside U.S. jurisdiction, the judge ruled.

But in early May, U.S. agents tracked the businessman to Trinidad and Tobago, and they persuaded police there to arrest him on the same bribery offense.

“Body Snatch,” proclaimed the headline on an editorial in the Barbados Advocate, which accused the United States of rejecting Barbadian justice. The case, it stated, “smacks of U.S. arm-twisting and an erosion of the sovereignty of Trinidad and Tobago.”