Dealings with Latin America

My father had many friends in Latin America. Some were people he’d met through his work trading beans throughout the region. Others were people he knew from living in the Dominican Republic as a refugee from the Nazis during World War II. Still others were fellow refugees who’d landed elsewhere, such as Venezuela; a small number were people he’d known in Vienna before they and he had fled.

Based in New York, my father traveled frequently, and I’d sometimes join him or visit people I knew through him, from the mid-1970s on. It also was common that people would visit us, and we’d often take them to dinner at Victor’s Café, a Cuban place, or Gallagher’s, a steakhouse, both on W. 52nd St.

There was a Venezuelan businessman named Milo, from a Jewish family in Vienna. My father estimated Milo was one of the two wealthiest people he knew. Milo’s origins were humble. His departure from Europe involved, at some point, hiding from the Nazis in a train station utility closet. To my amazement, he expressed nostalgia for that moment. He had a golden touch for business. “Money goes where money is,” people in my father’s office said, after Milo won the betting pool my father set up for the World Cup.

Milo had a canny eye for opportunities. Holiday Inn once built a hotel next to his sizable residence in Venezuela, mistakenly crossing slightly over the property line. Milo saw this and said nothing, then when construction was complete, informed the company of their error. When we visited Milo later, he had an even-larger mansion, marble everywhere. “Holiday Inn bought me a house,” he said, nonchalantly. 

On one visit to New York, Milo was with his brother. They both spoke English, but at one point were exuberantly saying, “Explain me,” about something or another. I wasn’t sure if that was an error drawing on their Spanish, or a joke, though probably the latter. We went to Milo’s apartment in Trump Tower, and my mother later expressed astonishment that a unit in such an expensive place was so ordinary-looking. My father remarked that people buy in Trump Tower for the name, not because the quality is high.

I was long aware that the countries our Latin American friends lived in had less political stability than the U.S.; when I visited Guatemala while still in elementary school, I asked how often they changed presidents, and one of our hosts said, “Every few months,” a joke but only because it was an exaggeration. Affluent people we knew often kept much of their wealth outside their countries, in real estate or offshore bank accounts. A young man from Brazil once showed me he was carrying a message to their Swiss bank; it was on yellow legal-pad pages, a pre-arranged marker of authenticity.

One friend of my father was the head of the central bank of the Dominican Republic, a position held by several people in rapid succession in the 1980s. My father said his friend cautioned him about speaking on the phone, since the central banker’s line was tapped, by whom he didn’t say. After one trip to Venezuela, I wrote a letter from Puerto Rico to a journalistic colleague in New York saying that Venezuela’s then-president seemed like a “businessman-crook.” My father was annoyed I’d sent this, or not made sure it wouldn’t get published, as he worried it might come back to haunt his dealings in Venezuela. “Why don’t you talk to the businessman-crook?” he imagined someone asking him.

There was a man from Mexico who was a close friend of my father’s until they had a falling-out. The man turned out to have held a long grudge that my father’s company had once dropped him as their representative in Mexico. There’d been some change in the government organization that purchased food in massive quantities, and the man’s connections were no longer there. My father was surprised his friend was upset, as there was no way to sell beans in Mexico without knowing the right people.

A basic problem in Latin America, I perceived growing up, is that its societies were often dominated by personalistic arrangements, at the whim of the wealthy and powerful. I contrasted this with the United States, with its long history of democracy and free-market capitalism, where public and private organizations operated with greater respect for the rule of law, and a level of accountability and transparency that could only be the envy of our troubled neighbors to the south. I was glad to live in a country that didn’t have some unaccountable caudillo presiding over a web of compromised institutions.

—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky.