Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The following night (Friday, October 26, 1962) the White House received a long and confused letter from Khrushchev. Its tone clearly showed his personal panic, and, to save his reputation, it was not released to the public. The next morning the Soviet Foreign Office published a quite different text, suggesting that a deal be made dismantling both the American missile sites in Turkey and the Soviet missile sites in Cuba. To those inside both governments, this was recognized as a Soviet surrender, since they knew that the Turkish sites were obsolete and were already scheduled to be dismantled within a few months. Although this would have amounted to giving something for nothing on the Russian side, it was rejected by the White House because it would have represented to the world a surrender of Turkey, our ally on the Soviet border, because the Kremlin had succeeded in establishing a direct threat on our border. Instead, the White House replied to Khrushchev’s unpublished first note, extracting from it an offer to remove the Russian missiles if we would lift the blockade and promise not to invade Cuba.

This acceptance was sent off to Moscow on Saturday night, while our mobilization for an attack on the Soviet missile sites if their construction continued went on. On Sunday morning, by radio from Moscow, Khrushchev’s acceptance was announced: the work on the missile sites was ordered stopped and they would be dismantled, with UN observation to verify the fact; in return the President would promise not to attack Cuba or allow our allies to do so. This led directly to the removal and deportation of the missiles and Ilyushin bombers over the next few weeks. The Soviet soldiers and technicians left much more slowly and never completely. Inspection of the sites was prevented by Castro, who was wild with anger at the way he had been brushed aside and finally sold out by the Kremlin. As a result of this failure, the American promise not to invade Cuba was also not given.

The missile crisis, by stripping the Soviet-American rivalry down to its essential feature as a crude power rivalry, cleared up a number of ambiguities and opened a new era in twentieth-century history. It showed (1) that the power balance between the two Superpowers was clearly in America’s favor; (2) that the United States government, in spite of Khrushchev’s doubts, had the will power to face and begin atomic war if necessary; (3) that no one really wanted thermonuclear war and that Khrushchev was prepared to go to any reasonable point to avoid it; and (4) that deterrence actually does deter and, accordingly, that a modus vivendi might ultimately be achieved between the two Superpowers.

The Disintegrating Superblocs

The chief consequence of the nuclear stalemate was that it made possible a greatly increased diversity in the world. The mutual cancellation of the strength of the two Superpowers made a situation in which states with little or no power were able to play significant roles on the world stage. At the same time, the Superpowers were not even in a position to press their desires on the members of their own blocs, and the neutrals could act with growing neutrality or even growing irresponsibility. Examples of such behavior could be seen in France, Pakistan, or Red China among the members of the two blocs, or in the Congo or the Arab states among the neutrals. Accordingly, the next divisions of our subject must be concerned with the disintegration of the Super-blocs and the growth of neutralism.

LATIN AMERICA: A RACE BETWEEN DISASTER AND REFORM

As time remorselessly moves forward through the second half of the twentieth century, a major problem for the United States is the fate of Latin America, that gigantic portion of the Western Hemisphere that is south of the Rio Grande. It is not an area that can continue to be ignored, because it is neither small nor remote, and its problems are both urgent and explosive. Yet, until 1960, it was ignored.

The Latin America that demanded attention in 1960 was twice the size of the United States (7.5 million square miles compared to 3.6 million square miles), with a population about 10 percent larger (200 million persons compared to our 180 million in 1960). Brazil, which spoke Portuguese rather than Spanish, had almost half the total area with more than a third the total population (75 million in 1960). In 1960 Brazil reached the end of a decade of economic and population expansion during which its economy was growing at about 7 percent a year while its population was growing over 2.5 percent a year, both close to the fastest rates in the world. (The population increase of Asia was about 1.8 percent a year, Russia and the United States were less, while Europe was only 0.7 percent a year.) Brazil’s rate of economic growth fell to about 3 percent a year after 1960, while its population explosion became worse, apparently trying to catch up with the Brazilian cost of living, which rose 40 percent in 1961, 50 percent in 1962, and 70 percent in 1963.

Except for its fantastic price inflation, Brazil’s problems were fairly typical of those faced by all of Latin America. These problems might be boiled down to four basic issues: (1) falling death rates, combined with continued high birthrates, are producing a population explosion unaccompanied by any comparable increase in the food supply; (2) the social disorganization resulting from such population increase, combined with a flooding of people from rural areas into urban slums, is reflected in disruption of family life, spreading crime and immorality, totally inadequate education and other social services, and growing despair; (3) the ideological patterns of Latin America, which were always unconstructive, are being replaced by newer, equally unconstructive but explosively violent, doctrines; and (4) there is simultaneously an unnecessary spreading of modern weapons and a growing disequilibrium between the control of such arms and the disintegrating social structure and the increasing social and political pressures just mentioned.

Some of the more obvious consequences of these four problems might be mentioned here.

Latin America is not only poverty-ridden, but the distribution of wealth and income is so unequal that the most ostentatious luxury exists for a small group side by side with the most degrading poverty for the overwhelming majority, with a growing but very small group in between. The average yearly per capita income for all of Latin America was about $253 in 1960, ranging from $800 in Venezuela to $95 in Paraguay and $70 in Haiti. The distribution is so unequal, however, that four-fifths of the population of Latin America get about $53 a year, while a mere 100 families own 9/10 of the native-owned wealth of the whole area and only 30 families own 72 percent of that wealth. This disequilibrium is seen most clearly in landholding, on which more than half the population, because of the area’s economic backwardness, is dependent. Agrarian reform (land redistribution), which seems attractive to many but is really no solution so long as the peasants lack capital and technical know-how, has been carried out, to some extent, in a few countries (such as Mexico or Bolivia), but, in Latin America generally, landholding is still very unequal. In Brazil, for example, half of all land is owned by 2.6 percent of the landowners, while 22.5 percent of all the land is held by only 1/2 percent of the owners. In Latin America as a whole, at least two-thirds of the land is owned by 10 percent of the families. Such inequality attracts a good deal of criticism, especially by North American “reformers,” but in itself it would be good and not bad if the wealthy owners felt any desire or obligation to make the land produce more, but the greatest bane of Latin American life, as it is in Spain also, is the self-indulgence of the rich that allows them to waste their large incomes in luxury and extravagances without any feeling of obligation to improve (or even to utilize fully) the resources they control. We shall return in a moment to the disastrous ideological patterns that lie behind this attitude.