Last week the US government confirmed that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela they would not be invited to the Summit of the Americas, which will take place between June 6 and 10 in Los Angeles. The decision had been suggested in advance, despite the fact that the current administration Biden has relaxed trade sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba.
The coordinator of the Summit, Kevin O’Reilly, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where the Republican legislator of Cuban descent, Marco Rubio, questioned him: “Have we invited someone from the Cuban regime to take part in the summit ?”.
The State Department official replied that the decision was the power of the White House. But pressured by the senator, O’Reilly marked a resounding “no”, extensive to the governments of Daniel Ortega and Nicolás Maduro in Nicaragua and Venezuela: “We do not recognize them as sovereign governments.”
Anticipated
“It is known that the United States government conceived from the beginning that the Summit of the Americas would not be inclusive. it was his intention exclude several countriesincluding Cuba”, tweeted the Cuban president, Miguel Diaz-Canel. Maduro had already joked a week ago that he would request a US visa to go to the Puerto Rican festival in New York, discounting the fact that he would not be invited to the Summit.
There were no surprises. But if you need to mark the field. Several Latin American presidents came out in defense of the excluded. Among them the Mexican Andres Manuel Lopez Obradorand the Argentine Alberto Fernandezwho proposed holding a counter-summit of CELAC (a body that Argentina chairs) in Los Angeles, something that quickly deflated: Díaz-Canel ruled out his trip to the northern country.
“In our continent we have a country that has been blockaded for six decades and survives as best it can (referring to Cuba). We should be very ashamed that this happens in our continent. There is another country that has been blocked for five years and was blocked in the midst of a pandemic (by Venezuela), when solidarity was more important than ever,” he insisted. Alberto Fernandez in his criticism.
Hours earlier he had met with former senator Christopher Dodd, Biden’s Envoy to promote the summit to the countries of the Southern Cone. And the spokeswoman, Gabriela Cerruti, confirmed the presence of the Argentine president at the Los Angeles summit.
The Argentine president had also spoken that day by telephone with Nicholas Maduro, and had promised to be a critical voice at the Summit of the Americas. The Venezuelan president publicly thanked “the brave statements of President Alberto Fernández.” “His firm voice will be one of the most powerful voices to question exclusion and the attempt to Latin America division and the Caribbean,” he added.
compensated
“As president of CELAC, Alberto must double up Biden, López Obrador, and the Havana, Caracas, Managua axis,” they explained at the Argentine Foreign Ministry. Maduro understands it well, and he is far from indignant. He knows that Biden’s decision to leave him out of the Summit of the Americas is weighed by domestic political reasons: the presence of Cuban or Venezuelan authorities would provoke internal rejections months before the legislative elections in November.
And on the other hand, the Venezuelan government he is more than satisfied with Biden and the relaxation of oil sanctions. Recently, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez confirmed that the United States authorized certain American and European oil companies to negotiate with the Chavista government. “Venezuela aspires that these decisions by the United States of America open the way for the absolute lifting of the illegal sanctions that affect all of our people,” Rodríguez tweeted at the time.
Venezuela was once a major supplier of crude to the United States before exports were hampered by crippling sanctions imposed by Washington. But the change in US policy towards the Maduro government occurred as soon as Biden entered the White House, undoing Trump’s decreeswith notable progress in recent months, due to the need for oil after the blockade of Russia due to the war in Ukraine: gasoline prices skyrocketed, a blow to the US pocketbook and to the electoral expectations of a shaky Biden.
And the winks from the American also include Cuba: commercial flights to Havana and other cities were authorized, and the limit of US$1,000 per quarter on remittances sent by Cubans to their relatives on the island was suspended. “A sign that the administration Biden anticipated the summit so as not to arrive empty-handed,” explained Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin American program at the Wilson Center, an independent political think tank for analysis in Washington. “The goal of the White House is to show differences with the Trump administration in the policies on Cuba, Venezuela and migration, amid doubts about the commitments that will be achieved at the summit,” he added.
On the other side, US lawmakers are equally opposed to any deal that appears to reward Maduro, having denounced the 2018 election as “grossly fraudulent.” “Give Venezuela a handful of undeserved gifts for his regime to promise to sit down to negotiate is a strategy doomed to failure,” said Robert Menéndez, the Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “The United States should only consider recalibrating sanctions in response to concrete steps in the negotiations, not simply in response to cheap words from a criminal dictator”, concluded the son of Cuban and anti-Castro parents, in rejection of Biden’s winks
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