“YOU are the United States, you are the future invader of the guileless America of Indian blood, which still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks Spanish.” So goes the ode “To Roosevelt” of 1904 by Rubén Darío, a Nicaraguan writer. His poem was occasioned by the seizure of Cuba and Puerto Rico by the United States in the Spanish-American war of 1898, in which Theodore Roosevelt played a minor role that helped him win the presidency, and by his subsequent grabbing of Panama, a province of Colombia.
Darío was prescient: in the next three decades there would be more than 30 military interventions by the United States in the Caribbean basin, in the name of what Roosevelt called “the exercise of an international police power”. These events, and the asymmetry of power and wealth that underlay them, gave rise to an enduring tradition of anti-Americanism (or “anti-yanquismo”, since “América” to Spanish-speakers means the entire land mass). In recent times this has been identified with the left—with Fidel Castro of Cuba, the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia. But...Continue reading
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