Imperial Veto Imposed on the Summit

Washington was responsible for preventing Cuba – also an American country – from being present in the sixth Summit of the Americas, held in Cartagena, Colombia.

It was President Juan Manuel Santos, the host of the summit, who traveled to Cuba a week before the summit, to persuade President Raul Castro to not participate in the hemispheric conclave.

That an American country would be excluded from participating in the debates on the major issues the summit addressed is simply an embarrassment for democracy. But even more embarrassing is that a country, by being powerful, would adopt the attitude of an emperor and give orders as to who should or shouldn’t attend an event of sovereign peoples.

In an interview prior to the summit, President Santos said that Latin America is no longer the United States’ backyard. Rather than the great Colombian – and thus, Bolivarian – government demonstrating this by ensuring that Cuba’s head of state was allowed to participate in the summit on its own territory, it can only be assumed that Colombia will continue to be part of the American empire’s backyard.

Of course, the large number of U.S. military bases in Colombia reflects the continued weakness of the sovereignty of certain Latin American nations. It is one thing for a country to decline to attend of its own accord – for whatever reason — but it’s quite another to not attend because an outside country imposes a veto.

During the opening of the summit, the General Secretary of the Organization of American States spoke of the “region’s democratic developments.”

Undoubtedly, one cannot deny that there has been progress. Yet this progress is still unsteady and can therefore threaten democracy and the nations themselves, as was evident in the coup d’etat in Honduras a couple years ago. The vetoes that powerful countries impose on countries like Cuba, which are small but full of pride, also threaten developing democracies.

While Cuba’s exclusion wasn’t the central topic of the summit, it became a focus by the meeting’s end.

Hopefully, in the next summit, Cuba’s non-attendance will be a result of its own accord, rather than as a result of the pressure of a world power.

Only when we aren’t endangered by the world power will we be able to say that our democracy has made significant and definitive advances.