What really was debated in Cartagena

By Jesús Arboleya Cervera

HAVANA – As expected, the Sixth Summit of the Americas, held in Cartagena, Colombia, ended without a political statement due to the differences between the United States and Canada and the rest of the countries.

It is not the first time this occurs. The same happened in the previous summits at Mar del Plata and Port of Spain, so getting together to not come together seems to have become the hallmark of these events.

The exclusion of Cuba has been the detonator for the disputes, but it would be a mistake to assume that the differences are reduced to this one subject. If it were so, a little common sense on the part of the United States would be enough to solve them. But the underlying reality is much more encompassing and transcendental: it is a question of the conditions that impose a different relationship between the U.S. and the region.

Obama is right; the problem arose long before he was born. What is in crisis is the philosophy that has sustained “pan-Americanism,” i.e., U.S. dominion over the continent.

Pan-Americanism originated in the Monroe Doctrine. Since then, it has meant U.S. opposition to any move toward Latin American sovereignty and integration. After World War II, the U.S. managed to consolidate total dominion over the region and, to legitimize U.S. interventionism in the region, the Organization of American States (OAS) was created in 1948.

New military aggression, dirty wars and servile governments, including a proliferation of genocidal dictatorships, were the fruit of a process that was carried out with the approval of this international organization, considered since its creation to be the U.S. “Ministry of Colonies.”

In 1994, when the United States felt like the absolute ruler of the world as the Cold War ended, the initiative of the Summit of the Americas was born. The Washington Consensus and the OAS’s Democratic Charter would serve as doctrinal premises for a new pan-Americanism whose purpose would be to install neoliberalism in the continent.

It was not only against Cuba that this conceit was created, but Cuba was its first objective and for that reason was excluded from the gathering. As a result, all the nationalist processes that have occurred in Latin America in the past 20 years, the advance of Latin American integration and the solution of social conflicts in the region have been made against the premises established by the summits and therefore against and/or outside the pan-Americanism represented by the OAS.

The issue, then, is that by defending Cuba, Latin American nations defend their own rights and interests, which explains their extraordinary unanimity in the face of the exclusion decreed by the U.S., no matter what the ideological and political differences of the nations at the summit may be.

The same happens regarding other topics like drug trafficking, emigration or the sovereign rights of the states, particularly the Argentine claim to the Malvinas Islands. But just as important (and evidently little reported by the international press) was Dilma Rouseff’s call for a relationship among equals. This implies important transformations in the international economic order that are resisted by the United States.

Nor is the U.S. blockade a problem that affects only Cuba. It affects everyone who tries to invest in or trade with the island, which contradicts the economic processes ongoing in the region. And these are of interest to the Latin American bourgeoisie, which is seeking to expand its opportunities so it can deal with the worldwide economic crisis.

It’s not at all odd, therefore, that the United States has remained isolated in this context. Actually, it has little to offer and its capacity to impose its positions has become more limited. In sum, we’re in the presence of a relative deterioration of U.S. hegemony in the continent. That’s what was reflected during the Summit and the cause for the tremor that is shaking the OAS’s foundations.

Obama is not George W. Bush, so I don’t think he’s pleased to represent a worn-out empire with a shameful past that everyone reminds him of. Most likely, he would prefer to continue to appear as the “alternative of change” that raised so many hopes in the world and even prompted the Nobel foundation to award him a Peace Prize on credit.

As he himself said, he does not bear the intellectual burden of his predecessors and maybe he would be more willing to discuss today’s topics with a mind that’s more open and flexible. The problem is that he cannot do that, because the forces that rule his country do not allow him that luxury. He complains he’s trapped in the past, but the truth is that he’s trapped in the present.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is not a figure from the past but the chairwoman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. This lady proposed that the United States sabotage the Summit of the Americas without realizing that, by doing so, the U.S. would sabotage itself.

In practice, Obama had no alternative but to go along with her. Maybe that’s for the best, because only by burying Monroism in America once and for all, Obama might become the president he probably wanted to be.

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