Whatever the official pronouncements coming out of the second summit of leaders of the 33-member Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC), in Havana, Cuba, earlier this week, under the theme, ‘Eradication of hunger, poverty and inequality in Latin America and Caribbean States’ and whatever President Donald Ramotar and Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett have to report on efforts to combat inequality, recognition of the challenges facing Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and the proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, the summit will probably be remembered as historic for other reasons.
The simple fact that Cuba hosted and chaired the summit has cemented the official acceptance and position of leadership that the hemisphere’s last communist holdout now enjoys in Latin America and the Caribbean. And, notwithstanding Amnesty International’s condemnation of the Cuban government’s round-up of dissidents and suppression of free speech, the event will be seen as a major political triumph for President Raúl Castro’s regime, perhaps best exemplified in two groundbreaking developments.
First, President Laura Chinchilla, the incoming CELAC chair, became the first Costa Rican head of state ever to pay an official visit to Cuba, after decades of diplomatic and political coldness between the two countries between the Revolution in 1959 and 2009 when her predecessor, Oscar Arias, re-established diplomatic relations with Havana. Cuba’s embrace by the rest of the region would now seem to be complete, although President Ricardo Martinelli of Panama stayed away, angered by the non-cooperation of the Cuban authorities with regard to last year’s capture in the Panama Canal of a North Korean ship carrying Cuban weapons in violation of a UN arms embargo.
Second, the Secretary General of the Organisation of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, was invited as a special guest to the summit, his trip to Havana marking the first visit by an OAS head since Cuba was suspended in 1962 at the insistence of the United States of America. The suspension was unanimously lifted in 2009 but Cuba has made it clear that it is not interested in returning to the hemispheric fold, with Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez declaring last week, “Cuba’s national position in relation to the OAS remains invariable: we shall not return to it.”
It would appear that Cuba is happy to focus its regional integrationist energies on CELAC, created in 2011, with strong backing from President Lula of Brazil and the late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and comprising all the countries of the Americas except the USA and Canada.
The OAS Secretary General, for his part, has said that it was an invitation he could not refuse since all the members of CELAC are members of his organisation and since he believes that CELAC’s aims as a mechanism for political dialogue are “complementary” to the objectives and work of the OAS. He was, however, careful to dispel pre-summit speculation that his presence in Havana represented a significant shift in Cuba’s posture towards reincorporation into the hemispheric body.
Indeed, after more than 50 years of exclusion and bad blood, it would be overoptimistic to expect such a radical change on the part of the Cuban government, especially in the face of the USA’s continuing official hostility towards Cuba. Even though there have been efforts by the Obama administration to relax some restrictions on contact with Cuba, Washington still maintains Cuba on its list of states that sponsor terrorism and, of course, the trade embargo is still in place.
Mr Insulza, who played a key role in negotiating the lifting of the OAS ban on Cuba, will no doubt have had some diplomatic discussions behind the scenes. But it is hardly likely that the reintegration of Cuba into the OAS would have been broached frontally. What was interesting was that Mr Insulza, in a press interview, applauded the economic changes being pursued by President Castro and expressed the hope that these would lead to “political changes that are also necessary” – necessary, that is, for Cuba to conform with the democracy and human rights requirements of OAS membership.
Mr Insulza has to tread very carefully though. CELAC is an obvious move by Latin America and the Caribbean to set and pursue their own agenda without the USA’s overbearing presence, facilitated in good measure by Washington’s own failure to deliver on promises of closer engagement. Now, the question arises as to whether CELAC, in addition to positioning itself as the main interlocutor for the Latin American and Caribbean region with other regions and big powers, could become a viable alternative to the OAS.
