Observations on democracy, economics

The U.S. has always been a country with great promise. We haven’t yet achieved all of our dreams as a nation.

In the last 30 years I have had the opportunity to travel to two countries that provided powerful lessons on democracy and economics.

First was as part of a team of U.S. educators who spent a few weeks in Brazil in 1991. Prior to the trip, I had been warned that Brazil was not a particularly safe country, advice that I did not heed because I had lived and traveled throughout Southeast Asia. A few days after we arrived, we witnessed an attempted mugging. Then while being driven back to our hotel at night, I inquired why they didn’t stop at red lights and was told that kidnappings for ransom were rampant, and it was unsafe to stop.

It became clear that Brazil was and is a country of extremes. Extremes in that there is a great deal of wealth concentrated in a tiny percentage of the population, and a great deal of poverty shared by millions of Brazilians. One of the results of this reality is crime. Weeks later, the 16 of us Americans were invited to a reception at the U.S. Consulate in São Paulo. As we waited in the lobby of our hotel, a friendly gentleman helped us to call taxis. As we pulled away, our gentleman friend was joined by another, and they stole all of our remaining group travel dollars from the hotel safe.

As I flew home, I realized that one of the missing pieces in Brazil was, and remains, a broad and deep middle class. Three decades later I worry as similar trends lead this country in the same direction, a widening divide between rich and poor and an increasingly narrow and shallow middle class.

A decade after the Brazilian trip, I had the chance to travel abroad as part of another exchange, this time to Cuba.

Visiting Cuba was in certain ways like time travel. The cars on the streets were the same 1950s Chevys and Fords of my youth. All were beautifully maintained and cared for but with bald and treadless tires. Every government building displayed huge black and white photos of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Along roadways billboards proclaimed “Socialism or Death!”

Reflecting on that trip, I realized that in all the time we spent in Cuba, I never once saw a person reading a newspaper. We heard exhortations on the blessings of socialism but witnessed little of the fruits and benefits beyond universal literacy and heard whispered stories of not enough food and medicine. I vividly recall pleas for help in gaining access to insulin.

Two trips to two different countries and cultures. In both places we were treated with respect and met decent and honorable people. But hard lessons lingered.

The Brazilian lesson that a country needs a vibrant and healthy middle class because that’s where the day-to-day action, work, and leadership of a country get done. Without it, Brazil and sadly too much of Latin America continue to struggle. The Cuban lesson on the reality of what socialism truly is and how it fails to inspire and deliver. And the related lesson of how inaccurate are the claims that the United States is turning into a socialist country.

The United States has always been a great country with great promise. We haven’t yet achieved all of our dreams as a nation. The journey to fulfill them continues and will be more successful if we are accurate with our understandings of what makes for a great democracy and healthy economy.

Building, expanding, and ensuring a middle class that is reflective and inclusive of our rich diversity need to be at the heart of our vision and focus if we are to succeed as a nation.

Hillkirk