How Fidel Snookered Everyone.(Jorge Castaneda; POINT OF VIEW)(Fidel Castro's criticism of Barack Obama)

The summit exposed Castro's peers in Latin America, not Obama, as the real innocents abroad.

Geopolitics makes for strange bedfellows indeed. After President Barack Obama's performance at last weekend's Summit of the Americas (and before that, on a quick visit to Mexico City) nearly everyone in Latin America and the United States was applauding the new president and fawning over his impressive performance. Everyone, that is, except for American conservatives, such as Newt Gingrich, and ... Fidel Castro. How in the world did Gingrich and an obviously rejuvenated Fidel end up as political blood brothers?

Conservatives like Gingrich believe Obama was snowed by the Latin Americans because of his inexperience and his propensity to please at all costs. They feel he countenanced interminable diatribes against the United States and his predecessors in the White House, standing largely mute in the face of the left-wing firebrands--Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and even Daniel Ortega, the former Sandinista rebel--and getting nothing in return.

The summit yielded no end to Chavez's backing and arming of FARC guerrillas in Colombia, his penchant for throwing opponents in jail, his support for the leftist FMLN in El Salvador and his intentional ignorance of the huge drug shipments from Caracas to just about everywhere. The summit brought no change in Morales's encouragement of coca-leaf cultivation or his decision to expel U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration authorities from Bolivia. Obama saw no backtracking by Correa from his decision to close the DEA base in Manta, Ecuador. And Obama saw no end to Ortega's endless tirades against "Yanqui" imperialism. In the view of U.S. conservatives, the Latins lectured the rookie president and took the youthful, stylish innocent abroad for a ride.

In fact, the opposite view is probably closer to the truth. If anybody scammed anybody, it was Obama who politically swindled his colleagues. He got something but gave them nothing: he received their applause, sympathy, good vibes and smiles, in exchange for a few pats on the back, the right body language and the incessant repetition of two or three buzzwords that the current crop of Latin American leaders simply revere: I respect you, I want to listen to you, we are all equals and, yes, we are partly responsible for the problems of the present and our mistakes of the past. But beyond these bromides, what did the Latins actually get? Felipe Calderon wanted Obama to seek congressional approval for a reinstated ban on assault-weapons but was stiff-armed by the U.S. president; Calderon also received no commitment from Obama to increase drug-enforcement funding or to reform U.S. immigration. Colombia's Alvaro Uribe left the summit without a public promise from Obama ...