The Testing of the OAS

The Organization of American States this week tests its ability to cope with the major problems of the Western Hemisphere. In San Jose, Costa Rica, a meeting of the hemisphere's foreign ministers will consider strained relations between Fidel Castro's Cuba and the U.S., and the threat of Soviet Russia to intervene against the U.S. on Cuba's behalf. OAS treaties authorize diplomatic, economic and even military sanctions, but no one expects such strong measures. The U.S. hopes at most for a unanimous hemispheric warning that may deter Cuba from its course of volunteering itself as Russia's penetration point in the hemisphere. The test for the OAS is the degree to which it can make its disapproval strong and specific.

Lamb Stew Years. The inter-American system that has produced the OAS was invented by Simon Bolivar, South America's George Washington. In 1826 hemisphere nations met with him in Panama to produce a treaty dealing with common defense, peaceful settlement of disputes and abolition of slave trading. There the idea rested until 1889, when U.S. Secretary of State James G. Elaine organized a trade-promoting "International Union of American Republics." In 1910 the organization got its present Spanish-colonial-style headquarters in Washington and a permanent secretariat, the Pan American Union. It then began a three-decade period of drowsy eclipse. For 26 years it was run as an international banqueting society by Director General Leo S. Rowe, a penny-pinching lowan who invariably served lamb stew to hold down overhead.

As the founding of the United Nations approached in 1945, the old organization suddenly woke up, thanks to a capable Colombian named Alberto Lleras Camargo (now the President of Colombia). In Mexico City, delegates agreed with Lleras that they should not turn over their powers of collective action to the U.N. At San Francisco the Latin Americans delayed two weeks until the right of regional self-defense was written into Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which subsequently became the basis of NATO.

Cuban Challenge. Thus strengthened, and renamed OAS, this regional group proceeded to prove under Secretary General Lleras that it could work by handling minor disputes. The one thing that it never got was the intangible factor diplomats call "presence"--confident acceptance of the OAS by its members as the competent and natural body to handle big inter-American problems. Hindering such presence is the feeling that the OAS is dominated by the U.S. Lately, Cuba has added another handicap in the form of a deliberate anti-OAS campaign. Last month, calling the OAS Washington's "Ministry of Colonies," it tried, unsuccessfully, to take its dispute with the U.S. directly to the U.N. Security Council. In such an atmosphere, the OAS this week faces its most important challenge.

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