Cuban–Latin American Relations in the Context of a Changing Hemis ...

needed to be reversed were at the heart of two major 2008 reports of Washington-based think tanks, the Brookings Institution’s Rethinking U.S.–Latin American Relations and the Washington Office on Latin America’s Opting for Engagement.⁴ Both reports were written with the intention of influencing the incoming U.S. president to make Latin America more of a priority than it had been under President George W. Bush.

Barack Obama assumed the presidency of the United States in January 2009 with more positive expectations from the region than any U.S. president since Jimmy Carter in 1977. The expectations were based on a number of factors. The most important was that Obama was not Bush. The outgoing U.S. president had been a polarizing figure for Latin America in the wake of his post-9/11 foreign policy. Bush had begun his presidency with a popular overture toward Mexico, but people’s optimism about a more enlightened Latin America policy from the United States faded with the rise of the “War on Terror,” which included rhetorical attacks against all regional governments that were at odds with the United States, especially Cuba and Venezuela. These countries were labeled as a Latin American “axis of evil” in terms that were comparable to the language Bush used in his verbal attacks on Iran, North Korea, and Iraq. As the challenge of leftist governments rose in Latin America and defeated the priority regional project of the United States, the FTAA, the Bush administration downgraded its involvement in the region. As a result, both U.S. influence and prestige, even among some of the traditional elites of the region, reached a historic low point. The Brookings report details the disconnect between there being virtually no U.S. national media coverage of Latin America and the reality that more than 30 percent of U.S. oil imports come from the region—a greater amount than is obtained from the Middle East, the region of primary U.S. governmental and media attention.

At the moment of that historic low point in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama in a speech in Miami stated his intended policies toward Latin America in terms that raised people’s optimism throughout the hemisphere. Obama spoke of a “new partnership with the Americas” that would be based on the principle that “what is good for