On to Trinidad: Opportunities Don’t Happen, They Are Made (Updated w. Photos)

By Al Giordano

Other than establish that he still doesn’t understand that Calderon Is Not Mexico, President Obama’s pit stop in Mexico City yesterday and today was so far the least productive (read: utterly without merit or meaning) foreign trip he’s made in his young presidency.

I say that as an admirer of the man, with the understanding that even the best of us make mistakes. Fortunately for him and for the hemisphere, he will land at 4 p.m. today in Port of Spain, Trinidad, for a Summit of the Americas that presents a golden opportunity to have made the carbon footprint of Air Force One’s continental travels worth it, even after that runway speed bump it hit in Mexico.

The first big opportunity that awaits the US President in Trinidad – a faster-than-thought-possible détente with Cuba – didn’t appear out of thin air; it was made. Washington’s recent announcement that it is easing the 49-year-old failed embargo against the country, coupled with the Justice Department’s prosecution of anti-Castro terrorist Luis Posada Carrilles, have finally broken the ice and turned the current in a new direction.

The immediate response from the Cuban government came yesterday while the country’s president met in Venezuela with President Chávez and his counterparts from Bolivia, Paraguay and Nicaragua:

"We've told the North American government, in private and in public, that we are prepared, wherever they want, to discuss everything -- human rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners -- everything, everything, everything that they want to discuss," Cuban President Raúl Castro said Thursday at a summit of leftist Latin American leaders in Venezuela.

And so the dance is on, with a capable step in kind from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

"We have seen Raul Castro's comments and we welcome his overtures," Clinton told reporters in the Dominican Republic.

"We are taking a very serious look at it and we will consider how we intend to respond," Clinton said."

Latin American leaders are moving virtually in unison to seize the moment. Secretary Clinton, in the Dominican Republic en route to Port of Spain, got an earful at her joint press conference with that country’s president, who used the appearance to say:

“We in Dominican Republic share this position, because after 50 years of the blockade we can call it a failure, Obama is blazing a new trail, a new way in the relations with Cuba and the Latin American region. We are also happy with (president) Raul Castro’s important and symbolic gesture that he’s willing to engage in a dialogue.”

With Air Force One now in flight from Mexico to Trinidad, we’ll be watching for a few more steps in that dance through White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ customary mile high “gaggle” with reporters.

Meanwhile, a full court press is on from the rest of América to bring Cuba back into the Organization of American States:

OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza announced his intention to back Cuba's readmission to his group as Western Hemisphere leaders began arriving for 34-nation summit that excludes Cuba. "We're going step by step," Insulza said, explaining that he will ask the OAS general assembly in May to annul the 1962 resolution that suspended Cuba.

The bigger opportunity in Trinidad for Obama, should he seize the moment, is for the US president to begin to normalize relations with Venezuela. Although the Bush Administration denied any involvement in the attempted 2002 coup d’etat against Venezuela’s democratically elected president, most Latin Americans don’t buy it. At very least, Washington lent support to that coup by recognizing the illegitimate dictator-for-a-day, Pedro Carmona, before the Venezuelan people overturned his short-lived military regime seven years ago this week.

During the summit, Obama will meet with the 11 heads of state of UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, including Chavez. President Lula of Brazil has already offered private and public advice to Obama to engage with Venezuela, a country that will have other key allies in the UNASUR room: the presidents of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay. The “one of these things that is not like the other” will be Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, the last bastion of right-wing authoritarianism on the South American continent.

Obama has already struck a long overdue conciliatory tone:

In an interview with CNN's Spanish television channel, Mr Obama was asked whether his encounter with Mr Chávez would be different from any other head of state.

"No, look, he's the leader of his country and he'll be one of many people that I will have the opportunity to meet," Mr Obama replied. "We want to listen and learn as well as talk. That approach of mutual respect and finding common interests is one that ultimately will serve everybody."

As Time has noted, the media-savvy “Hugo Chavez owned the last Summit of the Americas in 2005.” But the challenges are equally daunting for Chávez, as his friendly biographer points out:

"I think Chavez may be trapped at the Trinidad summit," says Nikolas Kozloff, who endorses Chavez's social policies and is the author of Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the U.S. "Populism thrives on conflict, but now with Obama in power, that's more difficult to achieve." After Washington and Caracas expelled each other's ambassadors last year, Kozloff adds, "Chavez faces a difficult choice: either proceed with his rhetorical strategy against the U.S. and risk alienating those in Latin America who want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, or come to a diplomatic understanding with the White House."

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, during a press briefing yesterday, opened the door a crack:

Q    This weekend with the Summit of the Americas, number one, are you ruling out a one-on-one meeting with Hugo Chavez?  And also I know you guys keep -- keep this secret, I guess -- are you having any one-on-one meetings with any leaders now?

MR. GIBBS:  We will get you a list of the highly secret meetings that we're having in Trinidad.  How careless of me to -- having included you all on such a secret trip -- (laughter.)  We'll get you a list.

There's no one-on-one meeting with Mr. Chavez on the schedule.  I believe he is among several leaders that are in a multilateral meeting.  We will get you a list tonight of what meetings we're doing.  There are a couple of bilateral meetings, but most of them are multilateral meetings.

Q    Would he at all -- if Chavez pulled him aside to say, let's have a conversation -- would President Obama --

MR. GIBBS:  Every time I pull the President aside to have a conversation we've had that conversation, so I assume he would do the same.

But at the same press briefing, White House envoy to the Summit, former US Ambassador to Mexico Jeffrey Davidow (caught again in his trademark anally retentive illusion that it is functionaries, and not leaders, who make policy) sowed the seed of missed opportunity. It was a screw-up that was backed also by National Security Council advisor Denis McDonough:

Q    Can I follow on that.  The President, Hugo Chavez, say that he would veto the declaration of the summit because it made no mention of the exclusion of Cuba from the summit.  How serious do you consider that threat to be?

AMBASSADOR DAVIDOW:  The declaration of the summit is a document, a fairly lengthy document that's been negotiated for the last nine months by all 34 countries, including Venezuela.  It's been a laborious process of negotiation.  Many of Venezuela's points were accepted, as were the points of the United States and other countries.

This decision to -- as announced -- to not sign the document is something that just came up in the last day or so, and is inconsistent with the negotiations that have been going on for almost a year.

Q    Can I just follow-up on that specific point -- it's just that Nicaragua and Bolivia have also said that -- because the document doesn’t talk about the lifting of the embargo, that they wouldn't sign.

MR. McDONOUGH:  As Ambassador Davidow was saying, the declaration process -- these declarations on some occasions have been signed by the member states at the summit, and other occasions they have not been signed by the member states as a group.

And I think also it's important to -- the President has made very clear -- you all saw the op-ed today -- that he is going to Trinidad and Tobago to engage in a conversation with folks to deal with the -- to pragmatically deal with the issues that are facing the people of the Americas today, to kind of rise behind -- leave behind the ideological arguments of the past, leave them in the past and focus instead on how do we work together in partnership with countries throughout the hemisphere to advance on dealing with the economic crisis, on energy and climate future, on citizen safety, on the issues that day in, day out, on any street corner anywhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, if you ask folks what they're most concerned about, it's those issues.  Those are the issues that President Obama hopes to engage with, with his colleagues from throughout the hemisphere over the course of the two days of the Summit of the Americas.

AMBASSADOR DAVIDOW:  To add one more point, as you will see when you read the 60-page document -- which I'm sure you will -- it makes no mention of the policies of any specific country.  It's not a list of the pros and cons about what the United States does or what Venezuela does or what any of the countries do.  The criticism is misplaced.

The US-Venezuela relationship will be the 800-pound gorilla in the room at Port of Spain, Trinidad. All eyes will be upon every smile or grimace, every step forward or cringe backward, every constructive word or counter-productive statement or silence by Obama and Chávez both.

Obama’s own functionaries, Davidow and McDonough, are obviously still stuck in a tired Bush-era paradigm regarding one of the United States’ most important suppliers of heating oil and gasoline.

In the coming three days, we will find out if the President is paying enough attention to correct the blunders of those two bureaucrats and use the direct diplomacy he pledged during the presidential campaign to engage Chávez directly.

Say or think what you want about Chávez, but as the elected and reelected president of a democratic nation of 24 million people, and the one who, with his presidential victory in 1998, set a string of countries – Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and others - down a more authentically democratic and progressive path than they had been on in more than a century, he and his country will be legitimate interlocutors in Trinidad for the aspirations of much of the hemisphere.

That’s the real opportunity to be hit or missed beginning this evening at the Summit.

If it gets screwed up because of the ineptness of Davidow and McDonough, among other US bureaucrats frozen in Cold War dogma, it will be Obama who will be perceived as having lost an historic opportunity that within hours from now will be served to him on a silver platter.

History will be made this weekend, one way or another. What is to be decided is whether it will be for good or for bad. The US President has a rare chance to transcend the tired Cold War paradigm that has held back the hemisphere for too long already. Your move, Mr. President, and good luck.

Update: In case anybody still doubts my suggestion that this weekend's Summit will be defined by the Obama-Chávez dynamic, here's the front page of today's national daily for Trinidad & Tobago:

Watch the rest of the international press follow suit, now...

Update II: The two presidents met on their way into the Summit this afternoon. Here are the first photos...

Gracefully done on both their parts. Developing...

Update III: The first three speakers at the Summit - President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina (representing South American countries), President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua (representing Central American countries) and Prime Minister Dean Barrow of Belice (representing Caribbean countries) - each called for the full recognition of Cuba. It can be safely presumed that a majority of nations in each of those three regions urged them to do so.

Now, at 7:31, President Obama has begun speaking...

Update IV: Speaking without a teleprompter, President Obama addressed the other nations of the hemisphere by saying, “At times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership… I’m here to launch a new chapter of engagement that will be sustained throughout my administration… We cannot let ourselves be prisoners of past disagreements. I’m very grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old…”

Noting that past relations “were undermined by stale debates… by a false choice between rigid state-run economies and unbridle capitalism,” Obama said, “I didn’t come here to debate the past. I came to work on the future.”

Summarizing his goals in four areas – economic prosperity, energy, security, and liberty – Obama also directly acknowledged and then addressed the statements raised by the previous speakers regarding US-Cuba relations.

It was a very strong opening statement. As soon as we get the full transcript in here (we anticipate shortly) we’ll post it on Narco News.

Update V: Here's the full text of the US President's remarks.