Susan Babbitt*.─ Raising the US flag in Havana, John Kerry admits that US policy toward Cuba has failed. But he restates US determination that Cuba be democratic. Democracy, by definition, is rule by the people. What this means is not obvious. Simón Bolívar, visiting Europe in 1805, wrote that “the great problem of human freedom [was] … inconceivable [to Europeans], a mystery that would only be made clear in the New World”. It has been made clear in the New World, or at least clearer, if we care to notice.
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Bolívar was a liberal, a man of the Enlightenment, admirer of Hobbes and Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau. But Bolívar considered European philosophers naïve about political freedom. They were ignorant about colonies, not knowing what it meant to be “even lower than servitude . . . lost, or worse, absent from the universe”.[1] Bolívar famously commented that Latin Americans had been sent misery in the name of liberty.
José Martí warned “slaves of Liberty” about the same naïve conception that bothered Bolívar. Leader of Cuba’s last independence war against Spain, Martí predicted political freedoms would not endure without a deeper kind of freedom, rooted in self-knowledge. He went so far as to proclaim, in his influential “Our America”, that the biggest hurdle was not, after all, US aggression; rather, it was that Latin America “show herself as she is … rapidly overcoming the crushing weight of her past”.
