Cuba won’t attend Americas summit
Communist country cites snub by U.S., host of L.A. meeting of nations across Western Hemisphere.
WASHINGTON — The president of Cuba announced Wednesday that his country will not attend next month’s Summit of the Americas, a major conference to take place in Los Angeles, after the U.S. refused to extend a proper invitation.
The decision throws the summit, which is crucial to the U.S.’ ability to demonstrate its influence in the Western Hemisphere, into further disarray.
President Miguel DíazCanel said on Twitter that “under no circumstance” would he attend. His comments came after days of speculation and an attempt by the Biden administration to find a compromise that would absolve it of having to invite a “non-democratic” government — while avoiding the risk of infuriating much of Latin America.
When Brian Nichols, assistant secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, told The Times and other media last month that the U.S. would not invite Cuba, the backlash was swift. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador threatened to boycott if the U.S. government, as host of the event, did not invite all the countries of the hemisphere.
A regional summit hosted by the U.S. without Mexico’s attendance would be seen as a major embarrassment for the Biden administration.
In addition to excluding Cuba, the administration plans to leave Nicaragua and Venezuela off the guest list. All have authoritarian governments that Washington considers to be in violation of the democratic spirit that the summit is supposed to promote.
After Mexico’s threat, a cascade of boycotts seemed to be in the offing. Several Caribbean countries balked at attending, though several have since backed off — Guatemala said it was staying home after the U.S. criticized its handling of corruption cases, and the rightwing president of Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, said he also would not attend. A major ally of former President Trump, Jair Bolsonaro is angry at U.S. and other Western criticism of his handling of the depredation of the Amazon.
The Summit of the Americas has been held every three or four years since the U.S. hosted the first in Miami in 1994. Cuba was excluded or chose not to attend most of the time until 2015, when, at the summit in Panama, Raul Castro famously met and shook hands with then-President Obama, opening the way to a thawing of Cold War-era relations between Washington and Havana that has since backtracked under Trump and with Biden.
Díaz-Canel, the first nonCastro to lead the communist-ruled country in more than half a century, lamented the U.S. position for failing to be “inclusive.”
Neither the White House nor the State Department responded to a request for comment Wednesday night.