Cuba to head CELAC in coming year of change.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
| Cargo | Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribenos |
Santiago, Chile, was the stage, on Jan. 27-28, of two political events that will surely go down in the history of Latin American and Caribbean countries as noteworthy. First, the presidents and heads of state of the 33 countries of the region--speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French-participating in the first summit of the Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribenos (CELAC), stood to pay an emotional tribute to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And within hours, they applauded for more than two minutes when rightist Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, a conservative, handed the rotating pro tempore presidency to Cuban President Raul Castro, a Marxist.
The presidents--white, black, and indigenous-signed a joint declaration in which they affirmed the need for concrete actions to end hunger and poverty as well as to achieve energy integration and assume a commitment to prioritize the education of their people.
However, beyond statements that could be confused with the platitudes coming out of any multinational meeting, the 33 heads of state-Catholic, Protestant, agnostic, atheist--agreed on specific points that also implied a confrontation with the North. Those points included a condemnation of the US embargo against Cuba and support for Argentina's claim of sovereignty over the Malvinas/ Falklands, occupied by Great Britain since 1833.
More important than Cuba's again participating in a hemispheric body together with all Latin American and Caribbean countries a half century after its expulsion from the Organization of American States (OAS)--and even assuming the rotating presidency for a one-year term with the responsibility of organizing and hosting the second summit in 2014--the meeting in Santiago was successful in definitively forming a new regional body in which neither the US nor Canada is a member.
OAS with Cuba, without US and Canada
None of the heads of state was willing to say that CELAC is an OAS with Cuba and without the US and Canada, but that is what it is. An analyst with the Brazilian online magazine Carta Maior lauded CELAC's creation, saying that "it has great historic importance, since it gives the countries south of the Rio Bravo [Rio Grande in the US] an equitable mechanism for cooperation, integration, conflict resolution, and dealing with common problems.
Those are tasks that the OAS has not fulfilled for one fundamental reason: its subordination to the designs of the US State Department and the...
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