The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, brandished on Tuesday the defense of freedom as a responsibility of all the countries of the hemisphere, in order to carry the message about which system works best for citizens, and insisted that it should reach citizens of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
“It also means taking the argument to nearby countries and to citizens across the hemisphere about which system is really better for their people. In Cuba, Venezuela, more recently, in Nicaragua, repressive governments offer a false choice between respecting people’s rights and approving their well-being,” she noted.
Secretary Blinken delivered remarks to guests at the 52nd Washington Conference on the Americas, co-sponsored by the Council of the Americas and the US Department of State’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.
The statements appear a day after the assistant secretary for the Western Hemisphere, Brian Nichols, confirmed to the network TNT24 that the governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba will not be invited to the upcoming Summit of the Americasto be held in June in the city of Los Angeles.
“Cuba, Nicaragua, the regime of [Nicolás] Maduro [en Venezuela] they don’t respect the Democratic Charter of the Americas and therefore I don’t expect their presence” at the Summit, Nichols said.
Speaking about the collaboration promoted by Washington between the different regional actors, Blinken pointed out that “there is always more strength and power” in facing challenges “when we are really capable of doing it collectively.”
In this regard, the head of US diplomacy highlighted “the vital role that the OAS continues to play,” an organization where almost all the nations of the hemisphere are represented.
On Monday, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who will visit Cuba and Central American countries this week, said in his daily morning conference that he had raised with President Joe Biden in last Friday’s phone call the issue of the exclusion of these countries. .
The Cuban government has not officially reacted to the State Department’s announcement, however President Miguel Díaz-Canel thanked his Mexican counterpart for his statements in a tweet.
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