Citations:
Beveridge, Albert J. “Cuba and Congress.” The North American Review, vol. 172, no. 533, 1901, pp. 535–550. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25105151. Accessed 15 Dec. 2020.
Author: FRANCISCO VALLADARES
The San Isidro Movement – Havana, Cuba
Article: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/after-rare-protest-show-dissent-cuba-artists-say-government-agrees-n1249234
The words protest and Cuba are rarely, if ever, in the same sentence together as the communist country has no tolerance for dissent. Yet, a rare protest in Cuba known as the San Isidro Movement, has gained traction worldwide as over 200 mainly young artists and activists have gathered outside the Ministry of Culture in Havana demanding the release of a jailed rapper as well for the right of freedom of expression.
Understanding Cuban history over the latter half of the 20th century will quickly demonstrate that the communist government Fidel Castro had solidified strongly in Cuba, tend to quell protests in a manner of hours by police or military. Cuba has been flagged for human rights violations for this exact reason for many decades now as protests in Cuba rarely ever get the chance to gain traction. However, the recent protests prove differently has the ministry had allowed 30 representatives from the crowd to voice their complaints on freedom of expression. While not an outright win for the movement, it stark’s a key milestone that the Cuban government had acknowledge the protestors at all by inviting representatives to voice their concerns as oppose to outright jailing all of them.
While the future of the San Isidro movement remains unknown for now, it has undoubtedly left its impact for future Cubans as a glimmer of hope that change is possible. The rise of the internet and social media has made it possible for Cubans across the island nation to learn of such protests occurring in Havana even when the communist government has a complete monopoly over all forms of telecommunication.
The CIA’s ‘Minerva’ Secret
The document provided entails of the United States intelligence community actively monitoring countless number of countries that used a Swiss made, but secretly CIA owned encryption device produced by Crypto AG that many governments in Latin America used throughout the Cold War. Unbeknownst to all the governments purchasing the encryption devices, the US along with West Germany had rigged many of the company’s devices in order to break encrypted codes from one country to another, much easier. Countries such as Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil are just a few of the many countries throughout much of the 20th century that the US was actively spying on. According to the NSA archives, some topics include “the 1973 military coup in Chile; the 1976 military coup in Argentina; the car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington D.C. in September 1976; the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airliner off the coast of Barbados in October 1976; the Sandinista revolution and the contra war in Nicaragua which the Argentine security forces covertly supported; and 1982 Falklands war between Argentina and Great Britain, among many others.”(1)
Based on our readings and the sheer amount of topics that are declassified in the document provided above, the main takeaway from it would be just how much more information the US had about the countries and dictators it backed in Latin America during the Cold War such as Augusto Pinochet for example. Pinochet, along with leaders from Argentina and Uruguay, collaborated under “Operation Condor” to preserve their power through the means of state terror and political repression. While many of these leaders had notorious human rights violations, the US had supported them all for the means of communism not to spread throughout the region with weapons, money, advisors, and occasionally troops for anti-revolutionary purposes.(2) The US had largely succeeded in its quest to have control of geo-politics in Latin America during the Cold War with the exception of Cuba which remained a thorn in the flesh for the US.
2: Wood, J. A., & Alexander, A. R. (2019). Chapter X. In Problems in modern Latin American history: Sources and interpretations (p. 238). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
3:https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/
Neo-Colonialism
Beginning in the early 20th century, we begin to witness the rise in neocolonialism throughout many Latin American countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica for example. One prominent example of neocolonialism would be the United Fruit Company which at its greatest heights, had a complete monopoly over banana exports across the globe, primarily in the United States.
In the photo selected above, we see massive amounts of bananas being boarded onto a United Fruit train car for exportation in Costa Rica. The exploitation of cheap labor, abundance of fertile lands, and weak governments paved the way for United Fruit to establish almost complete control of the countries It did business in through influencing local and national elections to ensure that they would remain the only exporter of bananas in Central and South America which would later coin the term “Banana Republics”. Without a doubt, countries that did business with United Fruit were the losers in this deal as they rarely reaped in any of the profits made on their land since United Fruit was a U.S. based corporation. This went on for much of the first half of the 20th century in which over time, the United Fruit Company would go on to become one of the biggest landowners in Central and South America by promising job creation and investing in infrastructure in the countries it operated in. Most notably, United Fruit was responsible for expanding railroads, radio and telegraph systems throughout the regions which was initially built to keep in constant communication with its ships and plantations.
While the legacy of the United Fruit Company is anything but controversial and its impact can still be seen today in the nations it operated in. It did provide many of the impoverished nations with up to date infrastructure on roads and railways while also unintentionally teaching local plantation owners and laborers on more sustainable agriculture techniques.
https://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/islandora/object/tulane%3A11664
Palace & Great Square in Rio de Janeiro
The colored etching presented above is of the great square in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The time period being 1823 when slavery was still legal is very evident on the lower right portion of the painting where we see a row of chained slaves and what appears to be a female slave washing clothes at a public tub. Aside from the slaves and few other characters in the background, we are shown just how vast and opulent the palace is with the church right alongside, being the tallest building with the cross on top as a way of showing respect to the Christian religion
A notable takeaway from the painting is how relatively quiet and peaceful the scene is, especially considering this is shortly after Brazil had declared independence from Portugal on September 7th, 1822. While skirmishes with the Portuguese empire persist for a few more years after, Brazil is relatively left intact from its declaration of independence. An anomaly compared to most of Latin America during the same time period. Most countries that fought for independence from the Spanish empire faced a lot of damage in not only infrastructure, but in human death toll as well. Knowing how much destruction had taken place to the countries across the continent, it’s possible that Brazil and Portugal took a much less bloodless revolutionary war with most buildings and churches left intact to avoid the destruction Spain and its colonies took as damage (Wood 28).
One interesting fact about the artist himself, John Mawe is credited as the first foreigner in Brazil to be granted access a license to visit the rich mining areas of Minas Gerals. There he was able to witness firsthand and describe in detail about the diamond and gold mines of Brazil.
1: Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations, edited by James A. Wood, and Anna Rose Alexander, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/baruch/detail.action?docID=5743856.