Latin America leaders trapped in past will struggle to give region brighter future

Take your pick: One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera. Those in essence were the two world views revealed during the weekend's Summit of the Americas, where US and Cuban rapprochement highlighted the divide.

The first view looks to history - the mythic world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most famous novel. It is also often atavistic, filled with ideological shibboleths.

It was the vision of Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan president, who lambasted the US for sanctions against seven officials charged with human rights abuses. "Never again a US invasion of Latin America," said Mr Maduro, who decried "one hundred years of misery and neoliberalism". It was also seemingly the vision of Rafael Correa, Ecuador's leftist president, who almost skipped the meeting to protest against the US presence.

By contrast, the other view seeks to bury the hatchet on an often rage-filled and choleric past. This was the vision of Juan Manuel Santos, who is two years into peace talks with Marxist guerrillas that seek to end the hemisphere's longest running rebel insurgency. "Too often, the region is trapped in the past," the Colombian president has said.

A desire to move on was also shared by Raul Castro and Barack Obama, who want to turn the page on half a century of cold war enmity. The US president said he was not interested in "having battles that started before I was born…We're looking to the future".

Mr Castro followed suit. After a long speech about historic grievances, Cuba's octogenarian leader changed tack, called Mr Obama an honest man not responsible for Washington's embargo against the island, and apologised for the emotion of his earlier remarks.

Of course, much of the rhetoric - some of it looking to the past, some of it to the future - was merely self-interested political theatre.

Mr Obama wants to end the embargo in part to remove one of Latin America's deepest and longest-held irritants with the US. It is also a far less controversial move than Washington's talks with Iran. Mr Castro, in turn, needs the foreign investment that would follow full detente to boost Cuba's economy. That is especially important as Venezuela's deepening economic crisis threatens the financial support Caracas provides Havana.

Political expediency certainly shaped the language of leaders adhering to older views of hemispheric relations. After all, scapegoating the US is a time-honoured tactic for Latin America leaders suffering declining popularity at home - as Messrs Maduro and Correa do. "I always [have] enjoyed the history lessons I receive," Mr Obama commented drily at one point.

Yet if Latin American incitements to self-pity at the hands of US bullying play well domestically, it is often for valid historical reasons. But history can also be a trap if it serves as an excuse to avoid the problems of the present. And there are so many in the region, from rampant corruption and exceptional violence, to slowing economies and the erosion of civil liberties in Venezuela. Yet few were discussed at the summit in a material way.

"Human beings are not born once," muses the narrator in Love in the Time of Cholera. "Life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves." That process of renewal characterises warming US-Cuban relations, even if the process, which began in December, will be slow.

"Obviously there are still going to be deep and significant differences," Mr Obama cautioned. "No one should entertain illusions," Mr Castro added. "We have many differences…we need to be patient, very patient."

The alternative, though, is to withdraw into an isolated past, regurgitating ideas whose time has gone. If that is most apparent in Venezuela, Garcia Marquez eloquently captured its dangers in one of literature's most famous closing lines: "races condemned to one hundred years of solitude do not have a second opportunity on earth."

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