The deputy president of the Nicaraguan regime, Rosario Murillo, confirmed Daniel Ortega’s attendance at the XXI ALBA-TCP Summit, which will take place next Friday, May 27, in Havana, Cuba. The meeting was called by Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, countries excluded from the Summit of the Americas to be held in the United States.
«On Friday the ALBA-TCP summit will be held, our Nicaragua will be there as it is, as it should be; our commander Daniel (Ortega) will be there. The voice will be there, as President Nicolás Maduro used to say; the voices of our peoples, in Havana and wherever it is necessary, with our voices and our forces, fight to continue winning », Murillo said in his customary intervention to official media.
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The XXI Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), which will meet in Havana, represents a new episode in the tensions between these three countries and the United States, which excluded them from the appointment that will begin in Los Angeles on June 6.
The ALBA bloc “will share common development strategies” and “will analyze the regional political situation,” the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement in an announcement to the meeting. The regional policy point refers to the situation created around the Summit of the Americas, the issue that has been dominating regional political news for days and overshadowing the preparations for a meeting that intended to talk about migration, economic development and climate change .
The United States announced at first that it was not going to invite Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to the summit because these countries do not respect democracy. Later, as the controversy intensified, he hinted that he was considering options so that they could participate, but not on equal terms with the rest.
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The Summit of the Americas, initiated in 1994 by the United States with a meeting in Miami, does not have a defined structure that determines who its participants are and leaves the invitations in the hands of the host.
Due to its informal relationship with the Organization of American States (OAS), from which Cuba was expelled after the triumph of the revolution, Havana was not included in the first appointments.
ALBA usually holds its leaders’ summits at the end of the year. The previous one was in December 2021, also in Havana. So issues of internal cooperation were discussed and the idea of jointly producing medicines was even launched.
