Cuban President Raul Castro arrived on Wednesday afternoon in Brasilia leading a delegation to attend on Thursday a presidential meeting between Latin American and Caribbean and China leaders, Cuban News Agency reports.
At the meeting the delegations of Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador and Antigua and Barbuda, members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) nations will be present, and participation is expected also for the leaders of countries that form the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and Mexico.
The event takes place in the context of the Summit of the emerging powers (BRICS), which held its annual meeting on Tuesday in Brazil and approved the creation of a New Development Bank with a capital of 50 billion dollars to fund infrastructure.
As part of the event they are holding a UNASUR BRICS Summit, an initiative of the emerging world economies that aims to strengthen ties with developing countries, similar to the meeting organized in 2013 in South Africa, when presidents of various African nations were invited.
Although Cuba is not part of the UNASUR, it was invited to the meeting as a member of the CELAC, to have conversations with the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who also plans the establishment of a Permanent China-CELAC Forum, scheduled for later this year in Beijing.
The BRICS New Development Bank, whose creation took two years of tough negotiations among its five members, was formed with equal contributions from each nation, and is expected to begin operations in 2016. The project challenges the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the two multilateral organizations that have dominated the world since the mid-twentieth century.
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