But Beijing’s real poke in Washington’s mostly blind eye came with the announcement that it would give credits to Cuba. In the globalization era, Cuba remains the exception to all rules. The Bush Administration’s Latin American policy targets the “containment” of Chavez or the “punishing” of Fidel Castro, who holds the Guinness World Record for “Most Years of Disobedience.” Inside sources in Cuba insist that despite forty six plus years of castigation, Fidel has yet to miss a meal or a conjugal opportunity.

Since China did not officially attach specific political language to its economic policies, official Washington ignored – or denied – the significance of China’s Latin America strategy. Indeed, as the Miami Herald’s Andres Oppenheimer observed, “President Hu Jintao spent more time in Latin America last year than President Bush.” (February 2, 2005) “And China’s vice president, Zeng Qinghong, spent more time in the region last month than his US counterpart, Vice President Dick Cheney, over the past four years.”

While Bush and Cheney asked Congress to increase US indebtedness with its additional $81 billion to maintain forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, China offered more than $50 billion in investment and credits to countries inside the traditional Monroe Doctrine’s shield. That sum surpasses Kennedy’s highly-publicized $20 billion for a decade of the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s.

Promoting specific kinds of trade with Latin America will help meet China’s wildly expanding energy demands. In 2007, the CIA estimated, China will import 50 percent of its oil. China also needs primary resources and food as it moves into the number two spot in world economy sizing.

When Chinese leaders showed up in capital-hungry Latin America with billions in their suitcases, it showed that they had thought about their country’s future even as US imperial officials trivialize their crises to justify drilling for oil in the Alaska wilderness or show their concern for future human life by force feeding a brain dead woman in Florida.

As US dependency on foreign oil grows and the price of crude hovers in the mid $50s, the Chinese might maneuver themselves into a position to actually sell some of that viscous substance to the United States – long before the Alaska drilling results in a drop of crude prices, China’s new investments have targeted oil, gas and minerals, signs that the Chinese pursue strategic and market rather than simple profit designs.

China already operates two Venezuelan oil fields and after signing a January agreement in Caracas, China will also begin developing other fields – seemingly in decline – in eastern Venezuela. China also agreed to buy 120,000 barrels of oil a month and build an additional fuel producing facility. Venezuelan officials announced that they expect trade with China to reach $3 billion in 2005, more than double 2004. And – hold onto your hats, Castro haters in the Bush Administration – a huge Chinese oil company will begin searching for potential oil fields off the Cuban coast.

Why did Chinese leaders choose late 2004 and early 2005 to make their whirlwind spending tour of several Latin American nations? First, they may well have noticed that Latin American governments no longer race to sign onto the US-backed Free Trade of the Americas agreement as they did previously to NAFTA in the 1990s. Because the free-trade-free-market model failed to perform as predicted – in Argentina it led to bankruptcy – governments that question Washington’s economic model now sit in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba; Bolivia and Ecuador may be next. Indeed, if the radical populist Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador succeeds in winning the 2006 Mexican presidential election – he is currently the leading contender – US-sponsored trade agreements may all be doomed.

Second, the petroleum mavens don’t expect supply to rise above demand in the near future. So, given this climate, China’s gaining access to oil and gas sources in the US backyard has flustered the Bushies, who remain preoccupied with Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea and Iran and their religious commitment to change social security, execute underage murderers, stop legal abortion and rescue the brain dead. Is it hard for the Bushies to see the world strategic big picture while they mobilize around family values and religious issues?

For more than a century, US policy planners have produced wonderful schemes for informal empire. Just as the China star shined in the eyes of late 19th Century policy intellectuals, a group of late twentieth century, mostly Jewish neo cons and anti-Semitic Soldiers of God decided to restructure the Middle East in the name of God, Israel and the free market. One group used the concept of advancing freedom, the other of advancing Rapture.

This kind of ethereally based transcendent thinking, however, often falls short of details – as the invasion of Iraq has shown. Neither the neo cons nor their strange Christian bedfellows have evinced much concern about the approximately 100,000-plus Iraqi civilians who have died in the post March 2003 US invasion. But the 1,600 US and British soldiers who have also perished causes serious political fallout. Iraq was destroyed. The Iraqi oil profits that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (now World Bank president to be) predicted would pay for the whole invasion have not materialized. No one in the Bush Administration seemed overly upset over the destruction of a country or over their calculated devastation of international law and the UN.

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