Joshua Seemu­n­gal

CARI­COM mem­bers are still dis­cussing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of boy­cotting the up­com­ing Sum­mit of the Amer­i­c­as that’s set to take place in Los An­ge­les, Cal­i­for­nia, from June 6, ac­cord­ing to Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley.

At yes­ter­day’s post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing, Row­ley said some re­gion­al lead­ers have raised the pos­si­bil­i­ty of boy­cotting the event if Cu­ba and Venezuela are not in­vit­ed, but no fi­nal de­ci­sion has been tak­en yet.

“It is be­ing dis­cussed and it has been dis­cussed. Be­fore I came here, there was a Cari­com heads meet­ing at mid­day and we dis­cussed this mat­ter and we are still dis­cussing it. Peo­ple have dif­fer­ent views and we are try­ing to come to a con­sen­sus po­si­tion be­cause we would love to have a Cari­com po­si­tion but some­times it’s dif­fi­cult for all of us to see eye-to-eye on every­thing all the time,” Dr Row­ley said.

The Prime Min­is­ter said the po­si­tion of the Trinidad and To­ba­go gov­ern­ment is that all coun­tries with­in the Amer­i­c­as—from Cana­da to Chile—should be in­vit­ed.

“Our po­si­tion is that it should be all-in­clu­sive. It shouldn’t be ex­clu­sive, where you pick and choose who comes to the sum­mit be­cause the Amer­i­c­as is all of us, even though we have dif­fer­ent styles of gov­ern­ment or our cir­cum­stances may be dif­fer­ent, it is in­clu­siv­i­ty that will al­low us to work to­geth­er…that po­si­tion isn’t shared by all…and we are cur­rent­ly try­ing to see how many per­sons we can get to­geth­er on that,” he said.

“Cu­ba has its dif­fi­cul­ties with the Unit­ed States with its sanc­tions…Venezuela…Nicaragua…If the host coun­try is say­ing you are not go­ing to be part of it, we are say­ing that’s not the right way.”

On April 27, US As­sis­tant Sec­re­tary of State Bri­an Nichols de­scribed Cu­ba, Venezuela and Nicaragua’s at­ten­dance at the Cal­i­forn­ian sum­mit as “un­like­ly.”

In re­cent months, Cu­ba and the US have squab­bled over sev­er­al is­sues.

The US is strug­gling to deal with a ris­ing num­ber of un­doc­u­ment­ed mi­grants cross­ing from the Mex­i­co bor­der, in­volv­ing many Cubans, while ten­sions have al­so in­creased over the Cuban gov­ern­ment’s han­dling of do­mes­tic an­ti-gov­ern­ment protests and the US’ con­tin­ued sanc­tions on the is­land.

Mean­while, US re­la­tions with Venezuela have long been prob­lem­at­ic, with the US con­tin­u­ing harsh sanc­tions on the South Amer­i­can state and fail­ure to rec­og­nize Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro as Venezuela’s head of state.

The theme of the 2022 Sum­mit of Amer­i­c­as is Build­ing a Sus­tain­able, Re­silient and Eq­ui­table Fu­ture.

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