Say Yes to America

In Bob Woodward's The Agenda: Inside The Clinton White House, we find a telling account of how President Clinton erupted when it became clear to him "that his administration was at the mercy of this traditionally Republican [bond] market."

Clinton and increasingly the rest of the populace are beginning to realize that global financial markets will determine which regions shall be the beneficiaries of economic largesse and profit from this new order. These markets are essentially unrestrained entities, accountable to no one and indifferent to national borders and ethnicity.

The financial gurus who attempt to predict the markets' eddies and gyrations are increasingly and publicly beginning to demonstrate their growing political power. This development explains why Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs Chairman Robert E. Rubin `60 is the most important man in the country.

It was largely at Rubin's urging that a multi-billion dollar infusion into the post-NAFTA Mexican economy was made. The realization--and the subsequent attitudinal change by United States policy makers--that our economy is inextricably linked with Mexico's, and increasingly with other American countries, is the true measure of NAFTA's success. The nightmarish debt-crisis of the 1980s, which left most Latin American economies devastated and smoldering, is unlikely to be repeated. There is now too much at stake for North Americans for summary abandonment.

I am convinced that cultural and economic hemispheric linkage is both inevitable and desirable. In fact, I've staked my political life on it.

Harvard is attempting to respond to this new development. (As a comparativist, I can't help but compare the poorly-lit Coolidge Hall--where the various area-studies centers are housed--and its early seventies, minimalist decor with the sumptuously appointed Center for European Studies.) In recognition of the interconnectedness of the American economies, the new Center for Latin American Studies should bring about a significant change. I read this as a subtle indicator of tectonic shifts in geopolitics.

Many Latin American countries are now attempting, admittedly on a small scale, to bridge the chasm of class-stratification. Through increased democratization and economic liberalization, they're trying in effect to become more like what the United States claims to be--an open, democratic, economically successful society.

Yet paradoxically, we see in this country widening gaps in economic strata, the largest such gap in all of the industrialized world and the de facto secession of the wealthiest from public life. But from my vantage point, the most serious challenge facing the United States will be the fallout from the fact that tertiary education is being increasingly cordoned off for those who can afford it. This is a clear affront to democratic principles and a poor macroeconomic strategy.

Yet, in spite of this, intellectual life in the United States is thriving. The Cambridge to New York to Washington D.C. route is the one to which every cosmopolitan is ineluctably drawn. It is the richest, most fertile source of intellectual challenge.

The United States will certainly remain a global power by my estimation for the next thirty years or so. And a thriving United States certainly benefits the entire hemisphere.

In his most recent offering, Del Amor y Otros Demonios, Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez reconstructs life in the colonialera Americas with his usual flourishes of magic realism. I've always thought that the way in which the Americas assumed its current form, or came to be--through a process shaped by desire and fear--is the most exciting, magical story of all. I feel very much like an explorer of old. So although my adventures in the United States are rapidly coming to an end, my--or rather, our--American adventure is just beginning.

This is Lorraine A. Lezama's last column for the Harvard Crimson.