South to the Future

Latinos had always found New Orleans simpatico. It was linked to them by the traditions of Bourbon Spain. Its easy graces, Gallic sauces, gaiety and gambling had been a consolation to Latin American political exiles since Jean Lafitte made common cause with the struggling republic of Cartagena in 1806.

Central American politicos, from the days of William Walker to those of dollar diplomacy, had hatched new revolutions in the musty Vieux Carre. Nowadays Guatemala's ex-Dictator Jorge Ubico, moping in his St. Charles Avenue garden, is about the only political exile left, but Latin America still looks on convenient New Orleans as its cultural and economic beachhead in the U.S.

From Progreso or Vera Cruz, it is an easy sail across the Gulf to the mouth of the Mississippi, and soon, from Caribbean ports like Puerto Barrios, the banana boats will again be putting out regularly for the voyage north to New Orleans. Many latinos--from Mexico and Yucatan and the other lands around the Caribbean--come mainly to shop in Canal Street department stores (where Spanish-speaking clerks are numerous), play in the French quarter (with its association with 18th-Century Spanish governors), study at Tulane's Department of Tropical Medicine, and take treatment at the Ochsner ("Mayo of the South") clinic. But others are on serious business. Last November an official mission from the Dominican Republic visited New Orleans, arranged for trade that has already upped Dominican imports from the U.S. by way of New Orleans 250%.

When the U-boats of World War II hit hard at East Coast shipping, many Latin American traders had to turn to New Orleans. Spruce, young (34) deLesseps Story (Chep) Morrison, the city's mayor-elect, wants to keep them coming.

Chep Morrison has talking points: the plans for a $200,000,000 deepwater seaway, a free-trade zone like New York's, and an International Trade Mart to match the culturally and socially successful International House. Airwise, the city has bid for leadership by building Moisant International Airport, the only major U.S. municipal field to be completed during the war. New Orleans still sends only two flights south each day to rival Miami's 34, but when four-engined stratospheric giants take over the Latin American shuttle, Moisant's 7,000-ft. runway will be an insignificant hour and 50 minutes farther from Rio and Buenos Aires than Miami's.

Last week, a month and a half before taking office, Chep Morrison whirled round the Caribbean circuit on a second missionary journey to tell latinos that New Orleans in the future, as in the past, would be muy simpatico.

The latinos liked to hear it: they liked Chep, too. Presidents and mayors showered him with banquets and tropical rhetoric. Chep responded by promising to learn Spanish in time to welcome them all to his city. New Orleans and its kinetic new mayor were off to a fast start in the competition to funnel postwar commerce and culture between the Americas.

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