Critical Support: What Does It Mean for Solidarity with Latin America?
October 30, 2015
Critical Support: What Does It Mean for Solidarity with Latin America?
by Chuck Kaufman
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Critical support for Left governments has been a hotly debated subject since long before I joined the US Latin America solidarity movement 28 years ago. The issue is particularly important today as the governments in countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA) are under unprecedented attack from internal and external forces. I have no illusion that this short essay will lay to rest the debate, but I want to frame the issues and what is at stake.
ALBA was formed in 2004 by Cuba and Venezuela, quickly joined by Ecuador and Bolivia. The Sandinista party in Nicaragua participated in Venezuela’s preferential oil program, which became known as PetroCaribe, and joined as a full member of ALBA when President Daniel Ortega took office in 2007. Honduras was briefly a member prior to the June 28, 2009 coup against President Manuel Zelaya. The Caribbean island nations of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are members and Suriname was admitted as a guest country in 2012.
The idea behind ALBA was to create an alternative model to the US-proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement (FTAA). ALBA is much more than a cooperative, rather than a competitive, trade pact. Its goal is to realize Simon Bolivar’s dream of social, political, and economic integration of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is anti-imperialist, providing strength in unity against what Bolivar called “the Colossus of the North.” The member countries are democratic and to varying degrees “on the road to socialism.”
To date, the economic backbone of ALBA has been Venezuelan oil. Cuba and Nicaragua especially have reaped huge benefits by being able to buy Venezuelan oil at market rates but with preferential payment conditions that have meant money for poverty reduction, small-scale agricultural development, and job creation. In addition, ALBA countries can pay each other in-kind rather than US dollars. That has been made even easier with the adoption of the “Sucre”, a bookkeeping currency that allows them to trade without using US dollars. Thus Cuba can pay for oil by sending doctors to Venezuela (or other ALBA countries) and Nicaragua can pay with black beans (which Nicaraguans won’t eat) and beef. Nicaragua and Cuba have had bilateral trade on the same basis with Cuba providing doctors and literacy experts in exchange for Nicaragua’s agricultural products.
The effects have been significant. While Cuba had already achieved full literacy as measured by the United Nations, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia have met that high goal since joining ALBA. All five countries have made impressive advances toward achieving the UN Millennium Goals of halving poverty by 2020. Nicaragua, the second, or now perhaps third poorest country in the hemisphere, (by some measures Honduras has dropped to number two), has made poverty reduction advances that are praised again and again by the UN. It is hard to see how any of the countries could have made such advances without ALBA cooperation.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/30/critical-support-what-does-it-mean-for-solidarity-with-latin-america-2/
Good reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016135657
