Companions, companions:
Let me start with words that are over a century old.
“When a strong people wants to give battle to another, it compels the alliance and the service to those who need it. The first thing that a people does to get to dominate another, is to separate it from the other peoples.”
José Martí left it written, 130 years ago after attending the Monetary Conference, an interested invitation from the thriving United States to the young republics of Our America at that time.
Accredited by the government of Uruguay, a country for which he had been consul general in New York since 1887, Martí, it seems, was almost excluded due to inexplicable delays and lying excuses from the State Department.
That Conference failed and it is affirmed that the Cuban contributed decisively to it, who would later write a deep and devastating analysis, dictated by his conscience about the dangers to which Our America was exposed by accepting the monetary union.
Straight on, without euphemisms of any kind, Martí defined in those lines the inability of the United States to understand its neighbors to the South. I quote:
“They believe in the incontestable superiority of «the Anglo-Saxon race against the Latin race». They believe in the baseness of the black race, which they enslaved yesterday and harass today, and of the Indian, which they exterminate. They believe that the peoples of Latin America are made up mainly of Indians and blacks.
“As long as the United States does not know more about Latin America and respects it more, - as with the incessant, urgent, multiple, sagacious explanation of our elements and resources, they could come to respect it -, can the United States invite Latin America to a sincere and useful union for Latin America? Is political and economic union with the United States convenient for Latin America? End of quote.
Martí's questions contain the answers in themselves.
Few texts are more visionary about the policy of the United States towards our lands in America, a policy that the excessive ambition of the empire has frozen in time, by refusing to listen to the voices that do not submit to it.
Whoever doubts it, put those words in front of the exclusive conception of the IX Summit of the Americas and they will verify their absolute validity.
The philosophical dogma that always accompanied this insatiable ambition is called Manifest Destiny, a deep-rooted conviction of a racist and supremacist nature, whose conceptual statement that served as context is the Monroe Doctrine.
Without renouncing either of these two conceptions, the US government convened the IX Hemispheric Summit in the city of Los Angeles, with discriminatory participation and insufficient regional representation.
In the case of Cuba, the exclusion was not only against the government, but also against representatives of civil society and social actors, including our youth. The United States is no longer satisfied with determining who and how the Cuban government should be. Now they intend to define who are the representatives of civil society, and which social actors are legitimate and which are not.
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