The Caribbean World and the United States: Mixing Rum and Coca-Cola

The United States has been more consistently involved in the Caribbean basin than any other area in the world. Forming part of the U.S. southern frontier, the region has been central to the definition of America's national interests - interests that predate its independence by at least a century. The great inland water transportation system flowing from the Ohio, the Tennessee, the Arkansas, and other rivers into the Mississippi in effect makes the American heartland a part of the Caribbean arena, and the trade connection has developed into an important element in the economies of many of the Caribbean islands as well as the United States. In this lively and provocative overview of postwar diplomacy in the region Robert Freeman Smith looks at the United States' relations with such countries as Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, as well as the commonwealth of Puerto Rico, observing regional policy and developments within the larger context of the cold war's U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Smith's analysis is well documented yet anecdotal: he broadens the standard foreign-policy focus to include America's cultural and economic influence on the region (and vice versa) and observes how these exchanges have in turn affected political and strategic decisions. Smith begins with an encapsulated history of the region before 1945 - the Monroe Doctrine, the building of the Panama Canal, the deployment of U.S. Marines to various sites of strife, and FDR's Good Neighbor Policy. He looks at the effectiveness and consequences of America's policy of nonintervention toward Latin America immediately after the war, and at how that policy began to shift with the outbreak of the Korean War and U.S. fears of a communist presence on its southern border. The emergence of Fidel Castro's Cuba and the pursuant crises and military maneuverings are policies of the 1960s exemplified by the Alliance for Progress, which Smith believes created false expectations on all sides. Concurrent with the policy history, Smith details the unique situation of Puerto Rico, which at the end of 1993 voted to retain its commonwealth status. Additionally, he focuses on the Reagan initiatives toward Nicaragua and El Salvador and on America's invasion of Grenada to illustrate how U.S. policies toward the Caribbean-Central America region changed course in the 1980s. Ultimately, Smith seeks to debunk much of the status quo thinking of U.S. intentions in the southern part of the hemisphere, arguing that those policies which reached their crescendo in the 1970s only helped to stimulate the "revolution of rising expectations," the crisis of overpopulation, and angry denunciations about "dependency imperialism."