Two Views South

President Kennedy, eager to prove himself as good a neighbor as Franklin Roosevelt before him, decided to use this week's White House reception for Latin American diplomats as one more place to stress his own favored slogan, "Alliance for Progress." To the President, the hemisphere's alliance must be a two-way street, with U.S. cash and technical assistance matched by Latin American self-help and selfdiscipline. Before him was an emergency request for $20 million to shore up Bolivia's chronically collapsing economy. Kennedy's response was to send a team of economic experts to Bolivia to determine exactly what the money might accomplish.

Other Side. Aid to nations eager to help themselves is the friendly side of the Administration's new Latin American policy. The other side is the desire to rid the hemisphere of Fidel Castro and the Communist intrusion that he symbolizes. And this job, Kennedy strongly insists, is not just U.S. responsibility but that of all the 21 American nations that are bound by the Rio treaty to combat Communist penetration in the Americas.

This was the doctrine that Adolf A. Berle, chief of Kennedy's Latin American task force, spread on his recent South American swing. Specifically, Berle sought to line up support for a collective diplomatic and commercial quarantine of Cuba by all members of the Organization of American States. In Brazil Berle ran into a personal affront from President Janio Quadros (see below), who is aggressively determined to show how neutral he intends Brazil to be in international affairs. When Latin America's biggest nation refused to line up with the U.S. against Castro, the prospect of others doing so was vastly dimmed.

At the Commodore. If collective action is not now feasible, what else can the U.S. do to arrest the Communist dominance of Cuba? The air was thick last week with rumors that Kennedy is about to do what he talked of doing during last fall's campaign: attempting "to strengthen the non-Batista democratic forces in exile and in Cuba itself." Mexican officials privately (and unhappily) fear that the U.S. may be planning to give massive support to an invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles. As proof, those who predict an invasion pointed to last week's meeting at Manhattan's Hotel Commodore, where, at U.S. insistence, anti-Castro refugee leaders of the left and right began working out a common program and a provisional government--which they optimistically insist will be proclaimed "soon" on liberated Cuban soil.

A handful of avowedly anti-Castro governments such as Guatemala and Nicaragua would welcome a successful invasion of Cuba and would not mind if the U.S. overtly supported it. A few other governments, including Venezuela and Colombia, might welcome an attempt to overthrow Castro so long as U.S. support was sufficiently well camouflaged to make official denials reasonably credible.

Too Big to Hide. But most Latin American leaders believe that an invasion attempt that had any real hope of success would involve U.S. support too big to hide. And in that case Latin American opinion might be quite crucial. Between their fear of pro-Castro sentiment among their own masses and the distasteful memory of past U.S. "interventions" ranging from the Mexican War to the Marine operations in the Caribbean in the 1920s and 1930s, even some of the U.S.'s strongest Latin American allies would waver. Latin American governments therefore tend to wish Castro would go away or fall of his own weight, are not very eager to join in the job though opposed to him, and only hope that the U.S. acts in a way it does not ever have cause to regret.

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