The Cuban government rejected this Monday its formal exclusion from the 2022 Summit of the Americas, which began this very day in the U.S. city of Los Angeles.
In a Foreign Ministry statement, Havana affirmed that the United States, “abusing the privilege granted by its status as host country,” excluded Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua from the summit, a decision that it described as “discriminatory and unacceptable.”
After weeks of controversy and criticism, Washington finally announced that it would not invite representatives of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to the meeting, alleging that they do not meet democratic standards, the EFE news agency reported.
According to Cuba, this measure is “anti-democratic and arbitrary,” and shows that the United States “conceived and uses this high-level dialogue mechanism as an instrument of its hegemonic system in the hemisphere.”
In Havana’s opinion, “one cannot speak of ‘The Americas’ without covering all the countries that make up the hemisphere” and the Biden administration “refused to heed the just demands of numerous governments” to change its position regarding Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
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The statement recalls that President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez “announced on May 25 that he would not attend” in what he considered “a firm decision by Cuba if all the countries of the hemisphere were not invited on an equal footing.”
The Cuban government also denounced “immoral pressure, blackmail, threats and dirty deception maneuvers” that it assures some countries in the region have suffered from the United States.
“These are usual practices of imperialism that reflect its traditional contempt for our countries,” says the statement, which calls for “cooperation,” “solidarity,” “respect” and “sovereignty” for the continent instead of “exclusion,” “meanness,” “arrogance” and “subordination.”
The statement adds that “Cuba has a widely recognized reference of supporting and contributing without reservations with any legitimate proposal for real and concrete solutions to the most pressing problems” of the American continent.
The island’s government thanked the shows of support Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have received in recent days from various countries and considered that the United States “underestimated the support for Cuba in the region.” It especially thanked the presidents of Mexico, Bolivia and Honduras, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Luis Arce and Xiomara Castro, respectively, for their support, as well as the members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).
In addition, it stated that “Argentina’s position as president of CELAC expresses the majority opinion of the region against a selective summit, as many governments of South and Central America have expressed in public and in private.”
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The controversy regarding those excluded, the statement argues, has shown the United States that “its unilaterally and universally rejected policy of hostility toward Cuba” is not a consensual position in the hemisphere.
The Cuban government considers that its exclusion is due to “arrogance, the fear that uncomfortable truths will be heard, the effort to avoid” addressing “more urgent issues” and “the very contradictions” of the U.S. political system, EFE reported on the Foreign Ministry statement.
“It is known in advance that the documents that are intended to be adopted in Los Angeles are divorced from the real problems of the region and are actually useless and ignored, beyond the effort to grant the OAS a supranational prerogative to decide on the legitimacy or not of the electoral processes and the imposition on the Latin American and Caribbean governments of repressive, discriminatory and exclusionary behaviors against migrants,” the statement asserts.
In addition, Havana says it is sure that “the voice of Latin America and the Caribbean, as in the past, will resonate in those days in Los Angeles, with the admirable and vertical absence of fundamental leaders who have enormous political authority, morale and recognition of their peoples and of the world.”
“We also have full confidence that the leaders of the region who decide to go will know how to support with dignity that the United States cannot treat our peoples in the way it did in the 20th century,” the statement added.
EFE/OnCuba
