Biden Admin Still Won’t Say Whether Cuba Invited to Next Week’s Summit of the Americas

Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canel (R) and his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel López Ob
YAMIL LAGE/AFP via Getty Images
Frances Martel

Two senior administration officials told reporters on Wednesday that President Joe Biden was still in “final considerations” for the invite list to next week’s Summit of the Americas – meaning the president had yet to decide who to invite for an event beginning on Monday.

The Summit of the Americas, an event bringing together the members of the Organization of American States (OAS), is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles on June 6. The invite list has caused weeks of controversy as the Biden administration initially hinted that it would not invite the region’s dictatorships – Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – prompting the far-left leaders of Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina to threaten boycotts. Brazil’s conservative President Jair Bolsonaro also threatened to boycott for unrelated and unclear reasons. In his remarks confirming that he would meet with Biden in Los Angeles, Bolsonaro lamented about the last time he saw Biden at the G-20 summit last year.

“I met with him at the G-20 [summit in October] and he passed me by as if I didn’t exist,” Bolsonaro claimed, “but that is how he treated everyone, I don’t know if it’s his age.”

The presidents of Peru, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil have confirmed their attendance, as well as other key leaders like leftist Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Bolivia and Honduras have confirmed they are not sending their heads of government, while Mexico appears to be on track to boycott the event.

Biden officials confirmed last week that the socialist regime of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro would not receive an invite to the event, as the United States does not consider Maduro the legitimate president of the country. The White House has yet to confirm, however, if it will invite President Juan Guaidó, who America accurately recognizes as the constitutional president of Venezuela but who holds no power in practice. Last week, the State Department coordinator of the Summit, Kevin O’Reilly, said that inviting Guaidó would have to be a “White House call.”

The Biden administration also confirmed that communist Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega would not receive an invite. It has refused to officially confirm it would not invite a delegation from Cuba, though puppet Castro-regime leader Miguel Díaz-Canel has said he would not attend if invited.

The attendance of the leaders of other leftist states remains uncertain as Washington has yet to decide on Cuba.

In a call with reporters on Wednesday, White House Latin America adviser Juan González and Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols reportedly refused to clarify the status of Cuba’s invite. The officials said, according to the Argentine news outlet Infobae, that Biden was still “listening to the opinions of other leaders and partners in the region” and making “final considerations.”

“We still have some final considerations, but we will, I think, inform people publicly soon,” Reuters quoted González saying on the same call.

González emphasized that the opinion of leftist Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is pressuring Biden to invite the Castro regime, is very important to Biden.

“We have had some very respectful conversations with Mexico and the Mexican president, who has asked that Cuba attend the summit,” González said, according to Infobae, adding that Biden “personally wants the presence of the president of Mexico” at the event.

“We want to facilitate a wide-ranging regional conversation and ensure that we are integrating all points of view,” the Argentine outlet further quoted González as saying.

The two officials also offered no clarity on Juan Guaidó’s (pictured) potential participation.

ADN Cuba, an independent outlet focusing on reporting repression in the country, cited other reports on the officials’ call quoting González as saying that the Biden administration is “not focusing on who is invited and who isn’t, but on the results that the Summit will have” – apparently dismissing the ongoing controversy.

Nichols posted a photo on social media of what he called the “final round of negotiations in Los Angeles” on Wednesday morning from the site of the Summit, promising “an exciting agenda for digital transformation in the Americas.”

The OAS is a coalition of explicitly democratic states; the OAS Charter repeatedly defines democracy and human rights as the foundation of the institution. Dictatorships have traditionally not attended the Summit of the Americas, but President Barack Obama broke the trend by offering concessions to the Castro regime that resulted in Cuba getting an invite to the 2015 Summit in Panama.

At that event, Cuban regime agents gang-assaulted pro-democracy dissidents and former political prisoners attempting to visit a bust of Cuban founding father José Martí. Three years later, at the Summit of the Americas in Peru, Cuban regime agents vandalized pro-democracy posters and used mobs to heckle and ultimately shut down events on fostering democracy and defending human rights. Socialist Venezuela, which was never formally excluded from the events, participated in at least one of the mob scenes.

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