[NYTr] Latin America Unites for Common Good

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com

Latin America Unites for Common Good

by Mike Fuller

Havana, Nov 12 (Prensa Latina) Next to an elegant restaurant where
organized crime giants of this hemisphere met in 1946, a modest team of
Latin Americans is seeking ways to correct the wrongs left by
neoliberalism in this region.

The Hotel Nacional of Havana hosted last week delegations from Cuba,
Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua here to build the first Grand-National
Telecommunications Company.

This and over a dozen new projects were approved in Venezuela in April
in fields like education, health, culture, trade, energy, agriculture,
transportation, tourism, mining, environment and sports.

When the US-sponsored Free Trade Agreement of the Americas was buried
two years ago at the America's Summit in Argentina, the Bolivarian
Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) was born at the parallel People's
Summit.

A quick learner, its first words were anti-capitalist, revolutionary
and endogenous, and its vocabulary grew to include integration,
cooperation and compensation of disparities.

ALBA's most sophisticated concept is best translated from Spanish as
complementariness, and is based on indigenous principles of reciprocity
with the community and nature.

Food before Internet

Cuban First Vice Minister of Communications, Ramon Linares Torres, has
been involved with ALBA since 2003, and last year at the International
Telecommunications Union conference in Turkey he reminded that it is
more important for people to eat than surf the web.

He described Cuba's progress in public internet access through Youth
Computer Clubs, and denounced the US for beaming destabilizing messages
to this island from military planes.

The Cuban Minister was at the Hotel Nacional in the hallway with
Venezuelan Franco Silva of the Social Responsibility Directorate of the
National Council of Telecommunications and Bolivian Vice Minister of
Telecommunications Roy Mendez Roque.

After speaking to his partners, Linares Torres sat down with Prensa
Latina and reminded of ALBA's full name, the Bolivarian Alternative for
the Peoples of Our America.

Linares Torres said its most important part is the "people, the
excluded masses, and we are working for them, not the market."

New Way of Negotiating

The Cuban official looked tired, and explained that this new way of
negotiating takes time, but said "somehow we manage to iron things out.”

"We're trying to do in telecommunications what is being done in health
and education,” he said, alluding to the free eye surgery, medical
schools and literacy programs springing up all over Latin America.

"We can't stop being a business, but our goal is not profit, rather the
solution of each country's specific problems," he explained.

In these talks every nation has a voice regardless of its financial
strength, and the negotiations seek complementary fulfillment of needs.

This could include one country providing a master's course in a
specific discipline in exchange for installation of a special system,
and on the table here are issues like rural telephone service, training
programs, engineering, fiber optics cables, research and development,
interconnection networks and industrial development.

Prensa Latina inquires about short, mid and long term goals and he is
very quick to specify that they are only working on the near present,
explaining "we need to form the business first."

As such, he doesn't have a long list of complementary relations that
have been established, but with a smile comments on the characteristics
of those who sit at the table.

He says the Cubans tend to be effusive, Venezuelans understanding,
Bolivians committed and Nicaraguans show great solidarity, but they all
share some level of these qualities.

Prensa Latina asks this accomplice in the creation of contemporary
Latin American ideology what he thinks of the new geometry of power,
and he says "even though we are diverse, we manage to get closer."

"I know there is power in union, and any country is weak without
allies," said Linares, "but it is best to unite for the common good."

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PL-29