James Munroe's declaration of independence - 7 April 1989

Of course a huge army of American correspondents aided, or shall we say swollen, by smaller armies from South America, Europe and – as always these days – from Japan descended on Havana last weekend to bring to us, as soon as possible, the ultimate truth about Mr Gorbachev’s meeting with Fidel Castro, who is now the longest-surviving dictator in South or Central America.

When he came to power, I doubt there were more than a dozen full-time foreign correspondents in Cuba. But today, the Cubans had their hands full keeping – how many was it? – 500, 800 ego scribblers at a respectful distance, isolated with their kind, their own bureaus, planted in their hotel rooms or least, television studios in the main, to watch the local TV, read the local press and get somebody to translate enough of it, to provide a plausible piece for cabling or speaking for the home audience.

The truth is the media of any country, including Cuba, are kept at all such meetings so firmly and far away from the talks and the participants, that the reporters talk mostly with each other, swap rumours try out theories, and could just as well have written their pieces before they went there.

I covered in the past, several so-called summits and found at all of them that the only credibility our reports could pretend to, was the fact of their being datelined from the country, the town of the meeting place. "Ah," the reader said (we hoped), "I see Cookie's in Nassau/Bermuda/Camp David, on the job, on the spot...".

We were all of us, in fact, in our hotels or on the beach, or milling around the lounge of the hotel in whose innermost recesses the great men – whom we were lucky even to see in the flesh – were holding their secret talks.

At the end of the day, or the two-day session or whatever, a press officer appeared and read it aloud, before distributing, a communiqué which said that the two parties had met twice or thrice, for so many hours they had been accompanied by their foreign secretaries and/or a treasury man, under-secretaries and the like, and, oh yes, an ambassador or two.

Since the invention of the hot line and the jet plane the principal function of an ambassador, to be the spokesman for his government and its policy, has been bypassed, eliminated, made obsolete.

I remember one big summit at which, at the last moment, somebody in the foreign office said, "By golly we forgot to invite the two ambassadors, get me the chief of protocol, quick". The press officer would recite a communiqué that any reporter older than 40 could have written for him, the meetings had been cordial, but candid, there had been a useful exchange of views, and the ground work had been laid for continuing good relations, based of course, on mutual interest.

Any differences of opinion were frankly stated but would not detract from the determination, of both parties, to work for prosperity and, from there, devotion to world peace.

In the old days, in the 1940s and '50s, I recall an annoying variation – never in the wording of the communiqué, but in the blankness of the fairly meaningless pieces we wrote. It was the last night, say, and we were all tapping away in the press room on little portable Swiss manual typewriters trying to invest the communiqué with enough speculative detail to convince our editors and our readers that we knew what had gone on.

When most of us had filed our copy and were about to invite each other for a nightcap to celebrate a counterfeit job well done, a small, roly-poly American with a bow tie and a chuckling expression would come into the room looking for a drinking partner.

We hadn’t seen him usually for the whole of the summit perhaps – he liked to work quietly in his hotel room. After this had happened a couple of times, we knew better. In the next morning’s New York Times there would be a long, astonishing dispatch from this same, canny American, a native Scot, spelling out in detail the whole story of the talks and the final agreement, if any.

It could only have been written by a reporter, who had somehow slipped into the room and hidden under the carpet. The fact is, he knew the leading players, not necessarily the top men, but their aides and deputies, before they got to the island or the capital city, and then, whenever they got out of a meeting he picked them off, one by one, charmed or enticed them into a confidence, "...better not let this get any further...", pumped them, thanked them and was off to the next participant.

He worked his tail off while we were wondering what the great men could possibly be talking about. And then came the long, the astonishing, piece in the New York Times and the embarrassed or amazed participants swore to each other, can’t think where he picked up this stuff, not from me, certainly.

And for the second or third time, James Scotty Reston had another Pulitzer prize. But today, such audacious enterprises... practically impossible, security has come to meant that the press, the media, are kept as far away from the leading players and their entourage as the gaping public except when they are called in by invitation en masse, and fed the soothing syrup of the communiqué.

So, what were the reporters, the American reporters, writing, thinking about before they got to Havana? What were the questions they would like to have answered which would not be answered except by whatever deeds would be seen to happen, in the next weeks or months, or perhaps a year?

The chief American interest was, and is, to have the Soviet Union stop supplying arms to Cuba, or through Cuba to Marxist insurrectionary groups in Central America, most especially to the Sandinista government or Nicaragua.

In other words the long range, perhaps impossible, American hope is that the Soviet Union will come to decide sooner than later to stay out of this hemisphere. Which, since President Monroe’s declaration of his famous doctrine, has been regarded – and still is – as the United States sphere of influence.

May I remind you how that doctrine came to be promulgated? Since the beginning of this republic, America's leader, have made a strong point of declaring their independence, not only of Great Britain, but of any constant political connection with Europe.

Washington stressed it in his farewell address, Jefferson recaptured it in his first inaugural. Now clearly, down the intervening two centuries, America has found from time to time that she had better take the part of one European country against another, most notably in the two world wars. And plainly, the more powerful the United States became, the less it could separate itself from the conflicts of the other, greater powers.

Today, in the nuclear age, the idea which was seriously proposed by some powerful Americans in 1939 and '40 – that America should isolate herself, once and for all, from Europe’s wars, should become fortress America – obviously, the idea is absurd and impossible.

Indeed, after only 40 years of the American republic it was already clear that direct conflict with European powers, over the freedom of the seas, over European possessions in this hemisphere, would be bound to happen, but the fifth president James Monroe, saw a way of expanding, or of finding, the old doctrine of independence from Europe. It would be to assert the independence of this hemisphere from Europe.

He had obtained Florida, last of the colonial conquests, from Spain. He settled the limits of the American-Canadian border, he eliminated border forts, the Europeans had no more claims in this hemisphere. But there was one threatening snag – the Russian government asserted a right to exclude, from the Pacific coast of north America, north of 51 degrees, all but Russian ships.

Monroe’s secretary of state effectively warned the Russians that the day was passed when the United States would tolerate any further colonising by Europeans in the new world, not only in north America, but in this hemisphere.

Monroe also heard from his minister in London that Spain, and perhaps Portugal, were planning to reconquer their old lands here, all of which had become independent republics. Well, in fact they weren’t, but the signs and porteds were ominous, so, in 1823, President Monroe laid down the new principle in the following declaration, "The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European powers".

This declaration was received in this country with almost as much jubilation as the original declaration of United States' independence. It did not strike fear, or even mild dismay, in Europe but only irritation. The powers had given up any such colonial intentions, and even in this country, once the declaration was made, the government was less than alert in looking out for interlopers. No objections were made to an occasional sneaky annexation, like Britain’s taking the Falklands.

And since throughout the 19th Century, and obviously in the 20th, no European or any other power has thought of invading and conquering any of the old European colonies – British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch –, there has been no need to give vivid visible proof that the United States meant and means to preserve and defend this hemisphere from outside intervention.

But the principle remains, and the rocky, suspicious, American relations with Cuba, are a proof of it. As recently as 1962, the planting of Soviet missile bases in Cuba looked to Americans like a violation of it.

And so, in a way, does the Soviets' massive military and economic support of Cuba. Only last Sunday an American television commentator said he thought it would be an equitable agreement if the United States cut off all aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, so long as the Soviet Union cut off all aid to the Sandanistas.

"Oh," said a colleague, "you mean, the Russians stay out of our hemisphere, if we stay out of our hemisphere?" Well, President Munroe and I don’t agree with you.

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