The two-day G77+China Summit, for which Cuba is the presiding nation for 2023, began in Havana yesterday. The Summit theme is, “Challenges to Development: The Role of Science, Technology and Innovation in Development.” At least 30 heads of state are attending in person out of the 130 member nations, in addition to 100 delegations. Included among the heads of state are Brazilian President Lula da Silva, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and the Presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, several African and Middle Eastern nations among others. Representing Chinese President Xi Jinping, is Li Xi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canel opened the summit together with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. The Cuban President first pointed to the austere nature of the event due, he said, to the effects on Cuba of the more than sixty years of the U.S. economic blockade. Listing the ills from which the nations of the South suffer—poverty, misery, hunger, death from curable diseases—Diaz Canel denounced the current world order as “unjust and unsustainable.” It’s time, he said, for the “pending democratization of the system of international relations” to finally be realized. It’s time “to end the centuries of colonial and neocolonial dependence, and tear down the barriers that have obstructed developing nations’ access to knowledge.”
