CELAC’s third round

HAVANA — After a dull first Summit in 2013 in Chile, under neoliberal President Sebastián Piñera, and a second Summit in Havana, justly described as brilliant and transcendental, CELAC inaugurates today its third Summit, in San José, Costa Rica.

Its agenda is loaded with purposes of emancipation and colored by a singular historic juncture, after the change announced by the United States and Cuba in the improvement of relations between both countries.

The CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries) — which includes all nations in the American continent, except for the United States and Canada — will now face a much more complex situation from a diplomatic point of view, because President Obama seems to have begun to answer the pleas of the Latin American heads of state regarding the lifting of the U.S. blockade against Cuba and a halt to the policy of open hostility and isolation against the island.

Needless to say, the 33 participating nations should share in the congratulations for the new attitude promised by the White House, but the voices asking Washington to take more eloquent actions to demonstrate its sincerity are unlikely to fall silent.

This time, the tone will not be that of an ultimatum, as it was in the past Summit of the Americas, when several presidents threated to boycott that all-American event if Cuba was not present.

In a way, the Summit in San José — with a consensual and temperate discourse — could become a dress rehearsal for the continental gathering in Panama next April. But it will likely include warnings, more or less subtle, from some officials who wish to take a close look at the apple offered by the U.S., suspecting (reasonably enough) that it might be poisoned.

The interest shown by Latin American and Caribbean nations in a real and full improvement of U.S.-Cuba relations is not a romatic attitude.

If those relations are not based effectively on reciprocity, sovereign equality and noninterference in domestic affairs, the Latin American countries could not feel reasonably freed of the hegemonic threat that the Colossus of the North has spread by the ton over the region throughout history.

The consummation of the CELAC’s strategic project, based on regional unity, economic and political integration, the struggle against poverty and the attainment of peace, cannot be achieved in the presence of practices that subordinate the performance of nations to imperial interests and punish governments that don’t submit to such practices.

It is to be expected, therefore, that the topic of the United States’ policy toward Cuba will be recurrent during the CELAC’s third Summit, although there will be other aspects as important as poverty and inequality, which may fill most of the available time.

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