Crawling from the Wreckage (41 page)

Chavez, together with Evo Morales of Bolivia, is the only evidence for the wave of radical leftist regimes that are allegedly sweeping to power in Latin America, and he is not a very convincing piece of evidence. Elsewhere, the alleged standard-bearers of leftist radicalism are mostly burnt-out cases like Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, once the leader of the Sandinistas but now a Catholic social conservative, or Alan Garcia, the once radical Peruvian politician who was recently re-elected to the presidency on a platform of fiscal responsibility.

The real promoters of change in Latin America are centre-left politicians like Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner and Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet, but they are social democrats in the classic Western European mould and they mostly avoid anti-American rhetoric. In the end, they will do far more to undermine Washington’s stranglehold on Latin America than Chavez, Castro and Company, and far more good for their people, too.

Chavez, like Castro, is good at revolutionary theatre, but he has little of Castro’s underlying seriousness. Often he offers nothing but froth and bombast, as when he celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the Venezuelan flag last March by introducing a new version in which the white horse, rather than going from left to right, goes from right to left. “The white horse is now liberated, free, vigorous, trotting towards the
left, representing the return of Bolivar and his dream!” he told the crowd. “Long live the Fatherland!”

Chavez promises to get serious about the revolution after this election, starting with redistributing most of the land to the peasants (currently, 5 percent of landowners hold 80 percent of the country’s land), but there is no particular reason to think that he really means it this time. He is a narcissist and an accomplished populist, with oil money to burn. He may even turn out to be Venezuela’s Peron, hanging around to blight the country’s politics for decades after his own time is up, thanks to a dedicated following among the poor.

But he is not a revolutionary, and the proof lies in his own definition of the word: “It’s like love. You have to make love every day in many ways. Sometimes carnally, sometimes with your eyes, sometimes with your voice. A revolution is love.”

Right on, Hugo.

Fidel Castro, on the other hand, is certainly a serious man. Not a particularly successful man, unless you count almost fifty years in power as success in itself, and he couldn’t even have achieved that without constant (though inadvertent) support from the U.S. government. But nobody ever accused him of being shallow
.

For anyone who knew the old Soviet Union, a visit to Cuba is always a trip down memory lane. From the ubiquitous revolutionary slogans and the absence of advertising to the cautious shorthand in conversation (stroking the chin means Fidel Castro) and the sour, fatalistic jokes, it is a Communist country of the classic era. But, this time, I kept thinking about an old Soviet joke that had not made it to Cuba (though I have now done my best to get it started there).

A rising young apparatchik in the Soviet Communist Party, starting to enjoy the privileges that come to high officials of the regime, brings his peasant mother to Moscow from her distant, impoverished village and installs her in a grand apartment in the Arbat. His mother, instead
of being delighted, just falls silent and looks worried. So he takes her to one of the special Party shops, a wonderland of Western consumer goods unavailable to ordinary Russians, and tells her to buy anything she wants. She buys only a kilo of oranges, and looks even more troubled.

Desperate to please her, he takes her to dinner at the Praha, the grandest and most expensive restaurant in the capital, but by now, there’s no denying it. This display of privilege is not impressing her; it’s frightening her half to death. So her son finally asks her straight out: Isn’t she pleased with what he has accomplished? Isn’t she proud of him?

“It’s wonderful, darling,” she replies. “But what will happen to us if the Communists come back?”

The question in Cuba is: what will happen if Fidel comes back? It has been eight months since he fell gravely ill and handed the president’s powers over to his brother Raul, and the “transition” is complete. Fidel’s lengthy illness created the ideal circumstances for an orderly handover of power, and by the end of last year the new collective leadership was firmly in charge. Most people were quietly relieved that it was all over.

It felt a bit strange no longer having Fidel on television all the time nagging and exhorting the population, a larger-than-life father figure, but, after forty-seven years of it most people were very tired of being treated like backward children. There was enormous respect for Fidel in Cuba, but there was also enormous weariness of him, combined with a great secret fear of what would happen when he finally went.

Partly it was just fear of the unknown—80 percent of Cuba’s population have known no other leader—but it was also fear of chaos, because everybody knew that the United States would use Castro’s death to try to change the regime. As Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana, said recently, Cuba has the same effect on the U.S. that the full moon has on a werewolf. Washington doubtless had all sorts of regime-change projects ready to launch as soon as the Old Man died.

Even Cubans who don’t like Castro don’t want abrupt political collapse and perhaps great violence. Neither do they believe that life would necessarily be better for the people who live in Cuba now if all those Cuban refugees in Miami and all of their money suddenly flooded back. They’d just buy up the island and take over again. So a smooth transition to the next generation of the Communist leadership is better than the chaos that would have followed if Fidel had just died suddenly one day.

The new leadership is collective, with brother Raul out front as chairman of the board. Its members are well known and respected by the Cuban public—people like Felipe Perez Roque, the foreign minister; Ricardo Alarcon, head of the National Assembly; Ricardo Lage, now in charge of energy; and Francisco Soberon, governor of the Central Bank—and they can expect a couple of years’ grace to show that they can grow the economy faster and give Cubans more freedom without destroying the welfare state that gives people free education and health care.

Or rather, they did expect a couple of years’ grace—but then Fidel started to get better. He is still far from fit, but he is out of bed and on the phone, and the spectre looms that he might decide he is well enough to take over again.

“[Fidel cannot participate in decision-making] the same way he did before because he has to dedicate a good part of his time to recuperating physically,” said Ricardo Alarcon last week. “To what extent he will go back to doing things the way he did, the way he is accustomed to, it’s up to him.” And it really is up to him. Fidel Castro so dominates modern Cuban history, and the reflex respect that all his colleagues feel towards him is so deep, that nobody would dare tell him he can’t take back supreme power.

But it would be a disaster for the regime. Many Cubans revere Fidel, but few want him back in power, jerking them around again with his constant, arbitrary changes of policy. Moreover, the odds are very much against another smooth transition of power sometime in the future, when death finally does take Fidel. Miracles happen, but not with any regularity.

It’s not having a billion speakers that decides which of the planet’s many tongues becomes the “world language.” What decides the issue is which language people choose when they are trying to communicate and neither speaks the other’s language
.

Predictably, the French were furious. A commission looking into the future of the French education system recommended last week that English, which it called “the language of international communication,” be made compulsory in French schools, and the usual suspects erupted in outrage. It would be the final surrender, an acceptance that English had replaced French as the international language, and they were damned if they would let it happen.

Most of the world thought that this battle ended about fifty years ago, shortly after the Second World War, when America emerged as the new superpower and its language became the normal medium of communication in international business and diplomacy. English had been gaining ground on French since Britain replaced France as the reigning superpower over a century before, and the rise of the United States settled the issue. Except in France.

It’s hard losing an advantage that your country has enjoyed for a long time, but the French went into denial about it. Some 97 percent of students in France study English at some point, but there is no official pressure to learn it well, and the French lag far behind their German, Italian and Spanish neighbours in their command of English. This impairs France’s international competitiveness and the commission was merely suggesting a remedy.

Foolish commission. They should have known. Politicians and intellectuals queued up in the French media to denounce them as defeatist. The dominance of English is merely a transitory thing, they argued, and should not be pandered to. Typical was Jacques Myard, a member of parliament for the ruling Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement Party) who announced: “English is the most spoken language today, but that won’t last.” Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish would become increasingly important, he predicted, and the position of English would erode.

It’s obvious why they like this prophecy so much. They all hope that the rise of these other languages and the relative decline in the importance of English will lead to a polyglot world where French would at least regain a position as one of the equal leading languages. (French has only seventy-five million native speakers in the developed world, but there is a huge additional reservoir of potential French-speakers in the former French colonies in Africa.)

Is this just wishful thinking, or is it really the shape of the future? Size matters: no language has ever risen to become the regional or global lingua franca without having a lot of speakers and a powerful state behind it. But once a language has achieved that dominant position, it is such a useful device for international intercourse that it doesn’t necessarily fall into disuse when the power of its original speakers declines. A thousand years after the Roman Empire in the West was overrun by
barbarians, educated Europeans still used Latin to communicate with one another.

The United States does not face the fate of Rome, but it will bulk much less large in the world in fifty years’ time than it does at the moment: other economies are growing much faster, especially in Asia. If there is more business to be done, many more foreigners will take the trouble to learn Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish—and Portuguese, Russian and Indonesian—than do so at the moment. But nobody is going to learn them
all
: everybody will still need a common language, and it will still be English.

It helps that India, which is destined to be the most populous nation of all, already uses English as a lingua franca within its own borders to cope with the multiplicity of other official languages in the country. By 2050, when China will be the largest economy, the U.S. second and India third, two of the three most powerful countries in the world will be effectively English-speaking for international purposes. But this merely reinforces a phenomenon that has already gained huge momentum.

Over the past twenty years, the switch to English as the first foreign language taught in schools has accelerated worldwide. In the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe it has replaced Russian and, in Russia itself, English is now obligatory in the schools. More recently it has been made compulsory in Chinese schools: it is now practically impossible to gain admission to a Chinese university without a decent command of English.

To the intense irritation of the French, English has even become the de facto working language of the European Union, although only two out of twenty-five member states (Britain and Ireland) are mainly English-speaking. An avalanche has occurred, and avalanches are irreversible.

A globalized world needs a common second language so that Peruvians can talk to Chinese and Hungarians can communicate with Ethiopians. It is an accident of history that the dominant global power was English-speaking at the time when this need became apparent, but the investment that hundreds of millions of people have already made in learning the language guarantees that this accident will have permanent results.

But it does make the French very cross.

The world capital of conspiracy theories used to be the Middle East, and the region was certainly awash in such theories after 9/11. Half a
decade later, however, the United States itself was seething with equally bizarre theories, thanks to dedicated amateurs distributing their work on the Internet
.

Dealing with questions from sincere people who were taken in by these theories took up a lot of my time, mostly because such theories were only obviously nutty if you knew how the intelligence world actually worked. Eventually I wrote this column in response
.

The 9/11 conspiracy theory is back, in a much more virulent form, and normally sane people are being taken in by it: I am getting half a dozen earnest emails every day telling me I must see a film called
Loose Change
. It has been around in various versions for almost two years, but it now seems to be gathering converts faster than ever.

Well, I have seen it, and I concede that it is a much slicker, more professional product than other 9/11 conspiracy films, and therefore more seductive. But the argument is pure paranoid fantasy, and it is rotting people’s brains.

There have always been two kinds of 9/11 conspiracy theories. The lesser version held that the Bush administration had advance intelligence of al-Qaeda’s plans but chose to ignore the warning because the attacks suited its purposes. The greater version insisted that there was no al-Qaeda involvement at all and that the attacks were carried out by the U.S. government itself, perhaps with Israeli help.