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re: Cuba, US and the Latino Vote; on Aid and Development (Tim Brown, US) (John Eipper, USA, 04/16/09 4:17 pm)

Tim Brown responds to JE's comments of 15 April: Had the Latino vote not gone heavily Democratic in 2008, Obama would not be President. Of course the same holds for African-Americans. As JE's comment on Cuban-Americans illustrates, immigrant groups with a particular concern initially tend to coalesce around it and support the party they feel best responds to their concerns, hence until recently Cuban-Americans have been heavily Republican. But as the group assimilates, it tends to lose its core adhesion and become more diverse in both its interests and politics. Today's Cuban-American community is, for example, much less strongly Republican than it was even four or five years ago. On whether foreign aid has ever successfully developed a third-world country, while I was a State not AID officer, I did manage several AID programs that were considered especially politically sensitive and a few recent AID Mission Directors once worked for me. As I have mentioned in prior postings, in private AID and IO development officers regularly called foreign aid the process of taking money from the poor in rich countries and giving it to the rich in poor countries. They do not, of course, say this in public since after all foreign aid is their "rice bowl." Once when I asked the Director of a major AID country Mission for a list of countries that have been developed with foreign aid he handed me a blank sheet to paper and said "none." He then went on to explain that AID does not develop countries, it just administers programs. Based on my own experience, he was painfully right. On Spain, having served in Spain under Franco as well as in numerous third-world countries (Mexico, El Salvador, Thailand, Vietnam, Honduras, Paraguay, etc.) I can assure you that while it was poorer before it entered the EC, it was richer than any country in the third world when it did so. But other countries now in the EC also followed than growth path. Ireland and some newer members come to mind, as does East Germany. The countries that have, in my view, gained the most for foreign assistance were countries that took the lead themselves and did not allow foreign aid agencies to dictate to them. The ones that did this most effectively did best. South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan and, in the western hemisphere, only Brazil and Costa Rica come to mind. -- For information about the World Association of International Studies (WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/ John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA

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