THE historic coastal resort city of Cartagena, Colombia, was host last weekend to representatives of 33 countries of the western hemisphere and the usual hordes of advisers, assistants, journalistic observers and protesters. The event was billed as the 6th Summit of the Americas, and while the discussions were relatively civil, the two-day meeting ended without an agreement. The big items on the agenda were the lucrative and destructive drug trade and how the countries of the entire region could meet while excluding one country – Cuba.

To the host of the summit, President Juan Manuel Santos, it would be “unacceptable” to hold another summit without Cuba’s presence. In a frank and hard-hitting speech, he told his guests, “The isolation, the embargo, the indifference, the looking the other way, won’t work … This path is no longer acceptable in today’s world. It’s an anachronism that keeps us anchored in a Cold War era that was overcome decades ago.” These are not the words of some wild-eyed leftie – these sentiments came from the closest and most reliable US ally in the region and a leader many outsiders regard as a moderate.

The more radical ones actually stayed away. Ecuador, which had pushed for the inclusion of Cuba at this meeting, wasn’t there. Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, did not attend, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who is undergoing treatment for cancer, couldn’t make it. Their group – the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, known in the region as ALBA – is a bloc founded eight years ago at Venezuela’s prodding. It is a vocal critic of US policies and its members say they will not take part in any future summit held without Cuba. That resonates with all the other nations except the US and Canada.

Both countries maintain their objection to Cuba because it is the only nation in the hemisphere that doesn’t practise democracy – a quite reasonable objection, but one which also provides a fig leaf for the US, which has friendly trade and diplomatic relations with a fairly recent enemy, Vietnam, where thousands of its young men were killed in a brutal war, and such bastions of freedom and democracy as China, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait.

It’s easy for the US to deal with these folks, because they don’t have much of a presence in the US. But there is a fairly large contingent of Cuban emigrés in the US, and they constitute a formidable political bloc in American domestic politics. Since the first wave of anti-Castro Cubans flooded into Miami more than half-a-century ago, every politician seeking the presidency has to make a pilgrimage to the Sunshine State to court their support by heaping opprobrium on the Castros and pledging to “liberate” the island.

When the Cubans went, Florida was a relative backwater with a smallish population. However, in the intervening years, large numbers of people from the colder northern states have migrated south and it now has considerable clout in the electoral college. Don’t forget – this is an election year – and both Barack Obama and his Republican opponent will be doing everything they can to secure the state’s 29 electoral votes.

The democracy argument doesn’t impress everybody – the Secretary-General of the Organisation of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, says, “Democracy is advancing in the Americas and the best way to strengthen it is not with external pressure, impositions or exclusions.” At the insistence of the United States, the OAS threw Cuba out at a hemispheric meeting in Punte del Este, Uruguay, 50 years ago. The grounds were that Cuba was a Marxist state and incompatible with the norms of the region, which, at the time ironically, was full of dictatorships – right-wing ones. The OAS eventually voted in 2009 to lift the exclusion, but Cuba has declined to re-enter the regional body.

The intractable drug trade

Colombia’s Santos also raised the tricky problem of drugs. His country is the world’s main source of cocaine but he says it has been relatively successful in curtailing the production of coca, from which the drug is made. However, cultivation has increased in Peru and Bolivia, demonstrating just how difficult it is to fight the drug trade: you stop production over here, only to find an increase over there. Likewise with drug-related violence – much reduced in Colombia, but flaring up in Mexico and Central America. Santos argues that the time has come to set aside the dogmas of the past and begin a frank discussion of the so-called “war on drugs”. He and some other Latin American leaders – Guatemala’s President Otto Pérez Molina in particular – want to examine de-criminalisation.

Molina put some ideas forward in an article in the British newspaper, The Guardian, a couple of weeks ago: “We cannot eradicate global drug markets, but we can certainly regulate them as we have done with alcohol and tobacco markets. Drug abuse, alcoholism and tobacco should be treated as public health problems, not criminal justice issues.” Obama’s take was a simple “My administration’s position is that legalisation is not an answer.” The clearest expression of the dilemma comes from the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper: “I think what everybody believes and agrees with, and to be frank myself, is that the current approach is not working, but it is not clear what we should do.” Santos sums up the question this way: “One side can be all the consumers go to jail. On the other extreme is legalisation. On the middle ground, we may have more practical policies.” But the decision for now is to do nothing. Santos says the new OAS mandate will examine all alternatives to current drug policies – everything from legalisation to the harsh measures of Asian countries, including the death penalty.

Passing the problem to the OAS is a neat way of shelving the question, and the US, with its monumental drug problem and giant entrenched drug-fighting apparatus, is no doubt pleased to pass this buck. But it still leaves the very real situation of the daily body count by narco-traficantes in places like Juárez, Mexico, and millions of freaked-out young drug users in the US and elsewhere.

The summit ended without the usual conference agreement. The inability of the parties to agree on including Cuba was one obstacle, but an unforeseen roadblock provided the clincher. In recent months Argentina has once again been trumpeting its claim to the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, over which it suffered a resounding defeat at the hands of Britain 30 years ago. It demanded that the summit unconditionally support its claim to the islands, which it calls the Malvinas. But again, both the US and Canada objected.

The Cubans were not detached observers – Fidel Castro, in one of his “reflections”, noted that he had watched Obama closing his eyes from fatigue from time to time during the summit, but at other times “he was asleep with his eyes wide open”. A prominent Cuban of the past, Jose Martí, watched a similar hemispheric summit more than a century ago and observed that the US had become the region’s new colonial master: “After viewing with judicial eyes the antecedents, motives and ingredients of the feast, it is essential to say, for it is true, that time has come for Spanish America to declare its second Independence.”

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca