– Jeffrey W. Rubin is professor of history and a research associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University, where he directs the Enduring Reform Project. Emma Sokoloff-Rubin is a Yale undergraduate and an associate editor of The Yale Globalist. The views expressed are their own. –

As leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies debated stimulus packages and financial regulation at the G20 in London in early April, policemen kept at bay protesters’ calls for attention to inequality, hunger, climate change, and human rights. The leaders talked economic shop as the protesters demanded new visions — and the disconnect did not offer much hope for addressing the ravages of crisis worldwide.

The Summit of the Americas this week is where leaders could link the issues discussed in G20 meetings to the concerns of citizens protesting outside. The Summit brings together the largest regional group of democratically elected, progressive leaders in the world today. By adopting a broader view than that taken at the G20, leaders of the United States, Canada, and Latin American countries could look for ways of responding to the economic crisis that also tackle the deep inequality facing nations across the hemisphere. As elected representatives of majorities seeking inclusion and change, these leaders have the unique opportunity to begin a conversation that will transform the terms of debate and action in the global public sphere.

In Latin America, economic crisis has started nations on the path to social and political transformation before. While memories of the depression in the United States focus on hardship, the 1929 global depression in fact ushered in an era of dramatic positive change in Latin America. No longer able to count on a stable world market, Latin American governments abandoned their reliance on agricultural and mining exports and instead began to stimulate dramatic and ultimately successful processes of industrialization. At the same time, populist leaders articulated new notions of nationalism, accepting and even welcoming long-excluded groups of rural peasants and urban workers onto the scene and granting them new citizenship rights.

In response, Franklin Roosevelt attempted to reverse a history of U.S. military intervention in Latin America with his Good Neighbor Policy, emphasizing trade and cultural exchange as a means for peaceful coexistence. This commitment to inclusion and alliance was crushed in subsequent decades by elite opposition to socioeconomic reform within Latin America and anti-communist operations on the part of the United States, which together produced military coups and state policies of repression and torture. By the late 1980s, however, dictatorships across Latin America were overthrown by a second wave of commitment to democratic citizenship.

Since then, as democracy has endured and deepened, leftist parties have won elections across the region, taking over from right-wing and centrist governments from Chile to El Salvador. In the process, Latin America’s leftists have reclaimed some of the social visions of the early days of industrialization, when development economists and political reformers alike spoke of humane capitalism, of growth with equity, and of governments as arbiters between capital and labor. Such a balanced approach has been literally unthinkable over the past two decades of free-market ideology, as Washington pressed Latin American governments to leave economic affairs to the market and inequality became yet more entrenched.

Today, once again, the idea of equitable development doesn’t seem radical, but rather makes common sense. And the potential for a hemispheric alliance is stronger than ever. Democracies in Latin America have already produced innovative strategies for tackling tough problems, from racial exclusion to urban poverty to migration, and they have forged progressive coalitions to support these new approaches. In Buenos Aires, factories run cooperatively by workers - factories that were taken over when the owners ran them into bankruptcy - compete efficiently in the market. In Rio de Janeiro, kids in shantytowns join music groups to fight drug trafficking and violence, while in San Cristobal, Chiapas, Mayan Indians organize transportation systems and marketing networks in urban neighborhoods where 30 years ago they would have been forbidden to live. And through hometown associations in the United States, Mexican migrants send back money to their communities of origin, where remittances are matched three-for-one by the Mexican government in an investment program overseen by the migrants themselves.

This is the face of democratic innovation in our hemisphere. For the first time ever, the vast majority of key actors in Latin America, from businesspeople to militaries, middle classes to grassroots social movements, play by the democratic rules of the game and respond to disagreement with counterproposals rather than violence. And for the first time ever, a U.S. President speaking a language of cooperation and dialogue could transform a century of distrust into a forward-looking hemispheric alliance.

There’s no better place to begin a broad conversation about economic recovery and social change than at the Summit of the Americas. President Obama and the leaders of Latin America and Canada have different backgrounds and strategies, but they bring many of the same concerns to the table. They all want educated populations, jobs that enable people to support themselves, secular governments, equality for all citizens, and societies free from violence. They also want to support what is perhaps our hemisphere’s greatest resource for the long term: the democracies that exist across North and South America today. To pull this off, they need to start looking simultaneously towards and beyond the economic crisis, within their own countries and across national boundaries.

That means talking about the economic crisis and about violence, women’s rights, hunger, the environment, drug policy, trade and immigration. Rather than silencing protesters, as the London police attempted to do, the heads of state at the Summit of the Americas — many of them former union leaders and community organizers — need to speak loudly and act boldly to address their citizens’ demands.

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

The U.S. case for isolating Cuba and keeping it out of international meetings such as this week’s Summit of the Americas sounds simple: the country doesn’t have democratically elected leaders, it holds political prisoners, it violates human rights and its citizens can’t travel freely. All perfectly true.

But if the logic used for isolating Cuba were applied consistently, neither China nor Saudi Arabia, for example, should have taken part in the London G20 summit. The U.S. State Department estimates China has “tens of thousands” of political prisoners and describes it as “an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party … is the paramount source of power.”

That has made little difference to the close relationship of mutual dependence between the U.S. and China, the largest creditor of the United States. During U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s February visit to China, pragmatism triumphed over human rights concerns as she urged the Chinese to keep buying U.S. treasury bonds.

In comparison to China’s “tens of thousands,” the State Department’s latest human rights report quotes a Cuban human rights group as saying the government there held at least 205 political prisoners at the end of 2008, down from 240 at the end of 2007.

The Saudi monarchy, according to the State Department report, denies its citizens the right to change the government peacefully, holds political prisoners, curbs free speech, restricts religious freedom, tolerates violence against women, and sanctions corporal punishment. The list goes on and includes lack of due process in the judicial system.

If the logic applied to Cuba were consistent, U.S. citizens should be banned from traveling to North Korea, an “absolute dictatorship” where the State Department noted extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and political prisoners. Instead, the only country to which the U.S. government restricts travel by its citizens is Cuba.

In advance of making his first appearance at a Hemispheric summit this week, U.S. President Barack Obama eased restrictions his predecessor, George W. Bush, had imposed to make it more difficult for Cuban-Americans with relatives on the island to travel and send money there. Obama also allowed U.S. telecommunications companies to bid for Cuban licenses.

These are small steps that fall far short of lifting the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, a Cold War measure that demonstrably failed in its aim to bring down the communist government of Fidel Castro, who defied 10 successive U.S. presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, before he formally handed power to his brother Raul last February due to a long illness.

HAVANA-WASHINGTON THAW?

Raul Castro, who is 77 and was Cuba’s defense minister for almost five decades, has since made several key changes in the leadership. They included firing foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque, one of a group of young officials whose dedication to Fidel Castro was so fierce they earned the nickname “tropical Taliban.” He was replaced by Bruno Rodriguez, a less doctrinaire foreign service veteran.

Some Cuba watchers saw this change as a move to facilitate efforts to thaw relations between Havana and Washington. How far and how fast Obama will go is certain to be a topic at the summit in Trinidad and Tobago where Cuba is the only country in all the Americas not invited.

Advocates of lifting the embargo, a policy change that would finally bring the United States in line with the rest of the world, see light at the end of the long tunnel. “This is the beginning of the end of the worst, least successful foreign policy experiment in the history of the United States,” in the words of David Rothkopf, head of a consultancy who blogs at Foreign Policy magazine.

Wishful thinking? Lifting the embargo would require repealing legislation — including the controversial 1996 Helms-Burton law - that penalizes companies doing business with Cuba. In one of its more bizarre interpretations, U.S. pressure resulted in Mexico City’s Sheraton hotel expelling a 16-strong Cuban delegation attending an energy conference there a few years ago.

The beginning-of-the-end school of thought points to legislation now pending - The Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act - which would allow all Americans, not only Cuban-Americans with family on the island, to visit. If that act were passed, a study for the International Monetary Fund estimates that up to 3.5 million Americans could visit annually.

Cuba is not on the official agenda of the Trinidad summit (the fifth in a series that began in Miami in 1994) but Venezuela’s left-wing, anti-American president, Hugo Chavez, is certain to bring it up, along with a demand that the 34-member Organization of American States readmit Cuba. Its membership was suspended in 1962.

The guideline that only democratically-elected leaders can take part in summit meetings dates from the 1994 gathering - and even then, the logic was flawed. The Miami meeting’s participants included then Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, a leader of dubious democratic credentials whose acts in office included dissolving Congress and closing the country’s courts.

He then won elections boycotted by the opposition. This month, a Peruvian court sentenced Fujimori to 25 years in jail for human rights abuses and involvement in two military massacres during a campaign against left-wing guerrillas.

Obama campaigned for president on a platform of “change we can believe in.” His moves on Cuba will provide a good indicator of how much of a change agent he really is.