On June 8, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez delivered a speech to members and staff of Cuban civil society excluded along with Nicaragua and Venezuela from the IX Summit of the Americas organized by the U.S. to begin on the same day.

In this speech, which should be read by every observer of the region, the President touched on issues of great historical and geopolitical importance, showing in great detail how this has not been the first time that the US has tried to deceive Latin America, the Caribbean and the entire world into accepting and legitimizing a neocolonial, anti-mercantilist, anti-sovereignty doctrine of the Global South and, therefore, imperial, of the American hemisphere, such as the Monroe Doctrine.

Díaz-Canel offers with a sharp historical note reminding his audience how Jose Martí himself, central hero of Caribbean sovereignty, dealt with political shadow games and imperial political impudence by stopping a plot to isolate him politically in the name of the interests of the American empire above all rationality of mutual inter-American coexistence. Martí intimately unveiled how the United States employed these tactics of political exclusion, to pick and choose what it considered to be the countries and leaders that deserved to be heard and congregated as members of an authorized common regional group: “José Martí, 130 years ago after attending the Monetary Conference, an interested invitation from the booming United States to the young republics of Our America at that time. Accredited by the government of Uruguay, the country of which he had been consul general in New York since 1887, Martí, it seems, was almost excluded by inexplicable delays and lying excuses from the State Department”.

The president lashed out against the neocolonial policies of economic sabotage and geopolitical ‘divide and rule’ deployed by the Anglo-Saxon empire, comparing how in the same way nowadays “the U.S. government convened the IX Hemispheric Summit […] with discriminatory participation and insufficient regional representation. In the case of Cuba, the exclusion was not only against the government, but also against the representatives of civil society and social actors […] the United States is no longer satisfied with determining who and how the Cuban government should be. Now they intend to define who the representatives of civil society are, and which social actors are legitimate and which are not.”

Interested readers would be well served to understand the implications for international and trade relations in the midst of the multipolar era by accessing Andrew Korybko’s article entitled “Next month’s Summit of the Americas is shaping up as a demonstration of how isolated the U.S. is“. The author outlines how Latin American countries are becoming autonomous power centers in the midst of a global systemic transition to multipolarity, debunking the US propagandistic insinuation that it has returned to its former superpower status in recent months.

Washington considers Latin America as its backyard, a sandbox controlled and regulated by the U.S. in which the U.S. can mold and shape hierarchies and economic relations with the sovereign populations of the region. When governments emerge that deviate from the economic formulas prescribed by the U.S. with which to govern their countries, they quickly become a liability that justifies some kind of intervention whenever the empire deems it necessary. This vicious neocolonial policy of dividing, hindering and dismembering the American hemisphere is nothing new for the United States, it can be said that most of its foreign policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean has been guided within the confines of the Monroe Doctrine which facilitates the neocolonial administration of the Americas.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez mentioned the countries excluded from the IX Summit of the Americas:”We are honored to head that list together with the leaders of Venezuela and Nicaragua and with you, genuine representatives of our people. As we are honored by the gallant solidarity of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of Lucho Arce, of Xiomara Castro, of the Caribbean leaders who have emphatically rejected the exclusions and of others who will surely do so in the course of the Summit itself […] The publicity show aimed at the internal politicking of the United States cannot hide the lack of real interest of that government in attending to the most serious and immediate problems of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Likewise, Díaz-Canel understands that given the deceptive and purely propagandistic nature of the event, many severe political, economic and financial problems were left unattended: “terrorism, including state terrorism, and the manipulation of the issue for political purposes are not agenda items. Neither Argentina’s right over the Malvinas, nor Puerto Rico’s right to independence will be confirmed.” For Cuba this centrality of sovereignty is non-negotiable. Therefore, the clearest violation of Cuban and regional sovereignty is the blockade against the communist island-nation which has been condemned internationally on repeated occasions.

Of course, Cuba and the other Latin American nations have differences among themselves, some differ in political and economic systems, strategies, resources and know-how, but if the sovereignty of each nation is respected, it has been demonstrated that the region can not only maintain stable relations, but that, in general, production, efficiency and the transit of goods and services are strengthened for all. The imperative of diversification of economic practices and the sovereign right to choose the best methods to promote the interests of the greatest number of its inhabitants is recognized, for which reason the President emphasized that “Latin Americans and Caribbeans do not consider ourselves to be anyone’s backyard or front yard. It is a notion that offends us and we reject it […] by forming the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, CELAC, the countries of our region reaffirm our unrestricted attachment to the defense of sovereignty, independence and self-determination. In promoting the necessary regional unity and integration, we root the commitment to respect diversity among us. In this region we share countries large and small; those that are rich in natural resources and those that lack them; those that export hydrocarbons or electric power and those that import it; the great food producers and those that need foreign trade to satisfy their needs.”

In addition to limiting communication and political and economic relations within the region and with other various states, the Monroe Doctrine isolates mercantilist potential by filtering who can do business with nations in the U.S. backyard. These anti-capitalist economic restrictions imposed on the American hemisphere by the United States apply across the board, as they are de facto limitations imposed on economic growth, e.g., energy, labor efficiency, technological know-how, education in general, and industrial and mercantile know-how are intended to reduce the ability of the Caribbean and Latin America to produce, exchange and exist with the world.