APRIL 19, 1999
By Andrew Cawthorne
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic, April 18 (Reuters) - Latin America's two most radical leaders -- Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela -- cemented their growing friendship with a lengthy private meeting on Sunday before departing a Caribbean summit.
Passionate interventions from both Castro and Chavez, who was four at the time of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, enlivened an otherwise relatively sterile gathering of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS) in the Dominican Republic.
"Great, as always" was how a beaming Chavez, 44, described his latest talks with Castro at a seafront hotel in Santo Domingo. "Above all, we ratified the strong will of Venezuela and Cuba to fight for the integration of the Caribbean and Latin America."
Castro, 72, deliberately seeking a low profile at the summit and wearing a smart business suit instead of his trademark military fatigues, waved at waiting reporters without comment after the meeting. On his way to the airport, he paused briefly to greet a pocket of Dominican supporters chanting "Solidarity with Cuba!" and "Long live Socialist Cuba!"
Heads of state from the more than 20 nations at the meeting, ranging from tiny banana-dependent islands to major Latin American countries like Mexico and Colombia, were heading home Sunday after the two-day summit.
Castro, while uttering barely a word in public, and Chavez, courting the media at every turn, dominated public attention at the second ACS summit. The hemisphere's only communist leader, Castro, and the left-wing former leader of a failed military coup, Chavez, both urged stronger action from fellow leaders.
In a closed-door speech at the summit which was released to Cuban media only, Castro presented an apocalyptic vision of the capitalist-dominated world as "a gigantic casino" and criticized the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a "fearful instrument of recolonization and exploitation."
He called on Caribbean leaders to join together "to make claims, to denounce things, to express the realities of the world we are living in."
Castro also criticized a recent WTO ruling which upheld a complaint by the United States and several Latin American nations that European Union banana import regulations unfairly favored former European colonies in the Caribbean over Latin American banana producers, where U.S. multinationals operate.
"This world is a gigantic casino, a chaos," he added in a familiar denunciation of global capitalism.
In a stirring address late Saturday, Chavez challenged the leaders to put words into action and get their peoples out of "terrible under-development."
"We go from summit to summit, but our peoples go from abyss to abyss," Chavez said. "We pray to God ... that the next century will be one of light and peace."
Chavez, who won the Venezuelan presidency last December through the ballot-box after his military coup failed in 1994, noted that he had already attended six international summits since taking power in February.
Excusing himself as a "novice" and a dreamer, Chavez also presented to his fellow leaders a vision of a future, united continent with full political integration and "a vast Congress of the Americas" based in Panama.
Chavez, who is seeking at home to create a Constituent Assembly that would dissolve Congress and rewrite the Constitution, also explained his self-styled "peaceful revolution" in Venezuela. "The Venezuelan people were dead ... now they rise up from the ashes," he said.
The leaders signed at the summit's end the Declaration of Santo Domingo which pledged greater commercial and political unity into the 21st century.
Among the most important elements were an agreement to cooperate better against natural disasters such as Hurricanes Mitch and Georges, which took thousands of lives and set economies back years throughout the region in 1998.
The ACS declaration also protested Western nations' use of the Caribbean sea to transport nuclear and toxic waste, and condemned the U.S. economic embargo on communist-run Cuba.
One of the ACS' chief long-term aims is to create among its 25 member states what would be the world's fourth-largest trading bloc, consisting of 200 million people and a combined gross domestic product of $500 billion.
14:55 04-18-99
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited
[ BACK TO THE NEWS ]