ALBA-TCP commemorates 20 years
ALBA reaffirms its principles and calls for a multipolar world order
At a special summit in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of its founding, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) emitted a Declaration that reaffirmed its principles and purposes. The special summit, celebrated in Caracas, Venezuela, was the twenty-fourth summit of the Alliance.
ALBA was established in Havana on December 14, 2004, as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples Our America in response to the U.S. effort to impose a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). FTAA would have been beneficial to the USA and deepened inequality in the region, in that it would have taken from the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean their right to protect their economies through tariffs and other measures. Standing against FTAA, Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro proposed an alternative approach to regional integration, involving mutually beneficial commerce among the nations. ALBA was established for this purpose through a Joint Declaration signed by Cuba and Venezuela, and the regional organization since 2004 has expanded to include ten socialist and social democratic nations of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Bolivia and Nicaragua as well as Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. It included Ecuador in the epoch of Rafael Correa, but since the fall of the citizen revolution, Ecuador is no longer a member.
The 2004 founding document described the proposed FTAA as “the most recent expression of the [US] appetite for domination of the region,” seeking to maintain a form of integration that historically “has served as a mechanism for deepening dependency and foreign domination. In contrast, ALBA proposes a different type of integration based on cooperation and solidarity. The founding document declares that “only an integration based on cooperation, solidarity, and the common will to advance together with one accord toward higher levels of development can satisfy the needs and desires of the Latin American and Caribbean countries, and at the same time preserve their independence, sovereignty, and identity.” The 2004 ALBA declaration envisioned a strong role of the State as “regulator and coordinator of economic activity,” seeking an improvement in the conditions of life of the peoples.
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The ALBA twentieth anniversary Declaration
The December 14, 2024, twentieth anniversary Declaration reaffirms “our firm commitment to the Cuba-Venezuela Joint Declaration and the Agreement for the implementation of ALBA, as well as the documents supporting the joining of the member countries.” It declares “the importance of reinforcing and deepening the founding principles and values of ALBA-TCP.”
It maintains that the only way to overcome the challenges created by the current unjust international order, particularly for developing nations, is “through integration, solidarity, and union of our peoples.” The Alliance, the Declaration notes, sees the human being as the foundation and the center of an integration that is committed to building “relations based on solidarity, complementarity, justice, and cooperation.” The alliance seeks to “defend the interests of our peoples,” in compliance with “respect for the norms of International Law and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
The twentieth anniversary Declaration condemns the use of “disinformation and polarization strategies that seek to destabilize our democracies, erode peaceful coexistence among our peoples, and orchestrate coups d’état.” It strongly rejects “the arbitrary, illegal and criminal unilateral coercive measures imposed by the government of the United States against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua,” which it views as “a flagrant violation of International Law and the United Nations Charter.”
Addressing issues beyond the region, the Declaration strongly condemns and repudiates “the terrorist actions perpetrated by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.” It expresses hope “for the fall of imperialism and the emergence of a new multipolar order, based on respectful relations and cooperation for the economic, political and social development of the peoples of the entire world.” In this vein, it applauds the role of BRICS, and it sees the entry of some countries of ALBA into BRICS as a positive step that will contribute to the prosperity of the region.
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Díaz-Canel’s address to the twentieth anniversary Summit
In his address to the Twenty-Fourth Summit of ALBA, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel described the founding of ALBA twenty years ago as a “transcendent moment in our common history.” ALBA has provided space for struggle by the dispossessed for their interests, providing “voice to those without voice.” It represents a continuation of the historic struggle of the region “against dependency and subordination to imperialism and the oligarchies of the region,” in which the dreams of Fidel and Chávez gave concrete response, not seen since the times of Bolívar, to the aspirations of millions of persons. He added that “the iron will of each one of us to see ALBA-TCP advance was what allowed the Alliance to consolidate itself in an inclusive integration process, which is distinguished by the coordination of actions to face common dangers, and by always putting the well-being, development and prosperity of the people at the center of decisions.”
Diaz-Canel provided a succinct and comprehensive critique of the current international order.
Imperialism and the oligarchies have never renounced the perverse objective of dividing peoples, sowing enmity among the governments of the region, in order to limit the scope of public policies of a social nature, to appropriate valuable natural resources, and to undermine the advance of Latin American and Caribbean integration that would deepen independence. They ignore international law and the most elementary norms of coexistence with absolute contempt for developing nations, through unilateralism and blackmail.
Therefore, a profound reform of the current international order is necessary, so that solidarity and cooperation finally prevail over differences. It is imperative to recover multilateralism in order to move toward a new order in which the countries of the South participate on an equal footing in global decision-making.
When the philosophy of dispossession ceases, the philosophy of war will cease, Fidel said in one of his historic speeches at the United Nations. Colonialism, neocolonialism, growing fascism and any other manifestation that threatens international peace and security spring from this desire for possession and control, from the permanent attempt to dispossess others of their lands, their property and even their lives.
The need for a new international financial architecture that would close the abysmal gap that today separates North and South and provide fair treatment to developing countries in the decision-making process and in access to sources of financing is increasingly evident.
There is an urgent need, as never before, for full respect for the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, particularly the sovereign equality of States, the self-determination of peoples, the peaceful settlement of disputes, and the rejection of the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State. . ..
The growing trend toward the application of unilateral coercive measures against countries that do not submit to imperial hegemony, causing direct, intentional and politically motivated damage to the sovereignty and independence of the States against which they are directed, is extremely alarming. They violate the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs [of States] and hinder the efforts of nations to promote the full enjoyment of human rights.
With respect to Palestine, the Cuban President declared:
The crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, and apartheid committed by Israel against the Palestinian people, which have been evolving for seventy-five years, are currently taking on extreme proportions, and it must stop. We reiterate our strong demand for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. Cuba also condemns the attacks perpetrated by Israel against friendly nations such as Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
The impunity with which the government of Israel continues to act is only possible because of the complicit political, military, logistical and financial support provided to the occupying power by the government of the United States, which acts cynically and perversely by presenting itself to the world as a mediator in the conflict, while preventing possible actions by the UN Security Council.
Cuba demands a comprehensive, just and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on the creation of two States, which would enable the Palestinian people to exercise their right to self-determination and to have an independent and sovereign State within the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and the return of its refugees.
Such reaffirmation of the two-state solution—which implicitly affirms the right of Israel to exist, in spite of the clear condemnation of Israeli crimes with respect to Palestine—is common among the governments and social organizations of the Global South and East (including ALBA, which issued a Special Declaration in Support of Palestine at the Twenty-Fourth Summit). The reiterated call for the implementation of the internationally agreed two-state solution stands in contrast to the prevailing tendency of the Left in the North, where a morally indignant and politically immature discourse aggravates ideological and political divisions.
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The formation of ALBA by Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro in 2024 stimulated a process of integration and unity in the region, standing in opposition to U.S. imperialist and neocolonial intentions. This process blocked the implementation of the FTAA, and it culminated in the formation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which was established in 2010, and reached a high point in 2014 with the Summit in Havana, which declared the region to be a zone of peace, in which foreign troops are not welcome. In retaliation, the United States has launched unconventional war against Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, the leading countries in the process.
At the global level, there has emerged a dynamic process of construction of an alternative world order, characterized by cooperation and mutually beneficial trade among nations, as the best guarantor of world peace and prosperity. Four of the nations of ALBA (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua) have played leading roles in this process of anti-imperialist and post-neocolonial construction.
In the current world war between imperialism and anti-imperialist construction, the Western powers are demonstrating that they are in decadence. Their political leaders and intellectuals do not grasp that a world of competing imperialisms, which drove human economic and technological development for four centuries, is no longer viable for humanity, because, in the first place, the world-system has reached and overextended the geographical and ecological limits of the earth; and in the second place, because the neocolonized peoples have demonstrated that they refuse to accept the terms of the neocolonial world order. With confusion among their political and economic elites, the world powers are incapable of discerning a constructive road, with respect to the international order and their own national economies. Meanwhile, leading nations of the Global South are demonstrating, in theory and practice, the only viable road for humanity.
These objective conditions of Western imperialist decadence combined with anti-imperialist construction from the Global South and East establish possibilities for the formation of alternative political parties in the nations of the North, which put forth the notion that the interests of the nations and peoples of the North are best served by a constructive participation in the formation of an alternative world order emerging from the South and East.
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