Rubio sparks diplomatic storm before Americas summit

The Dominican Republic announced on Tuesday that Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua will not be invited to the X Summit of the Americas in Punta Cana this December, citing the "current context of political polarization" in the Americas.

The gathering that once convened every head of state in the Western Hemisphere is, despite its challenges, still considered the region's most important forum, organized every three years by a rotating host country in close coordination with the U.S. State Department and the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS), of which the three excluded countries are not members.

Diplomatic sources tell RS that as of late 2024, the Dominican government — which in its announcement extolled its "excellent relations" with Cuba and said the "strictly multilateral" decision was meant to ensure the highest turnout possible — had assured Cuba more than once that it would be invited to the December gathering.

In a statement on Tuesday, Cuba's foreign ministry said the about-face was the result of pressure on the Dominican Republic from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who earlier this year referred to the three countries' governments as "enemies of humanity.”

Asserting that the move poses obstacles to respectful dialogue between the U.S. and Latin America and the Caribbean, Cuba’s Foreign Ministry said that a gathering based on exclusion and coercion, rather than securing a high turnout, will instead be “destined for failure.”

In the lead-up to the last Summit of the America in Los Angeles in May 2022, the Biden administration's similar decision to not invite Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, presumably over their human rights records, set off a diplomatic firestorm in the region, provoking boycotts by the presidents of Mexico, Honduras, Bolivia and several Caribbean countries while calling into question the fate of future gatherings, the first of which took place over 30 years ago in Miami at the initiative of the Bill Clinton administration

The mounting pressure from leaders across the region for the U.S. to organize an inclusive summit with all 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean prompted the Biden administration to announce a modest sanctions relief package for Cuba that had been in the works since before he took office, as well as to initiate negotiations with the Maduro government in Venezuela to hold competitive elections in exchange for the issuance of U.S. oil licenses.

No other country in the region has issued a statement thus far about the exclusion of the three countries, nor have any confirmed or denied their attendance at the December meeting. The State Department has not commented publicly on the Dominican Republic’s announcement.

If it’s true that the U.S. pressured Santo Domingo to exclude the three countries — dubbed the "troika of tyranny" during Trump's first administration and subject to fresh sanctions during his second — the ensuing diplomatic fallout could complicate the administration's efforts to secure cooperation from some Latin American countries on larger U.S. goals in the region like targeting drug trafficking organizations, curbing irregular migration, reducing Chinese influence, and strengthening commercial ties.

While some regional governments, notably Paraguay, Peru and Argentina, have readily lined up behind Trump’s agenda in the hemisphere, others like Mexico and Panama are collaborating begrudgingly in part to avoid the potential consequences that other countries like Colombia and Brazil — who have sparred with Trump over the war in Gaza, counternarcotics operations in the Caribbean and interference in their justice systems — have faced thus far.

“The Trump administration’s economic threats and coercive measures have spread fear throughout the region, deterring most governments and leaders — even those who in the past would have protested the exclusion of these countries from the Summit — from confronting its interventionist agenda,” Francesa Emanuele, an expert on the OAS at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told RS. “If the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean has gone largely unchallenged, with only a few exceptions such as the presidents of Colombia and Brazil, it’s difficult to imagine that this year’s exclusion of Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba from the Summit will provoke the kind of protest seen in 2022.”

In 2018, when President Trump became the first U.S. president to skip a Summit of the Americas, the three countries were invited by host country Peru, with Venezuela’s Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, along with Cuba’s foreign minister, in attendance alongside Vice President Mike Pence. In 2015, under the Obama administration, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua all attended the Summit in Panama, leading to the first meeting between a U.S. and Cuban head of state in a half-century.

In its statement on Tuesday, the Dominican government — in a guarded swipe at the OAS — clarified that at other recent summits it has hosted of multilateral organizations where the U.S. does not participate, like the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Organization of Iberoamerican States (OEI), all three countries were invited and fully participated.

At the OAS’s General Assembly this June in Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba similarly accused the Trump administration of arm-twisting regional governments — specifically to vote for Cuban-American pro-embargo dissident Rosa María Payá, nominated by Rubio, to serve on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights — alleging its Caribbean allies were threatened with aid cuts if they didn’t support Payá.

A close and relatively prosperous U.S. ally in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic has, under center-right President Luis Abinader, signed several foreign representation contracts with Trump-aligned lobbyists this year, RS has previously reported.

These include two deals the country's foreign trade ministry and national intelligence directorate have signed with Continental Strategy, led by Trump's former OAS ambassador Carlos Trujillo, and a renewed multimillion-dollar agreement its presidential office signed with Vision Americas, led by the George W. Bush administration OAS ambassador Roger Noriega. The latter contract has in recent years included subcontracting work for Western Hemisphere Strategy, led by Daniel Diaz-Balart, the son of late Cuban-American Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart and nephew of senior GOP appropriator Mario Diaz-Balart, a Rubio confidant and advocate of maximum pressure against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

The former contracts coincided with Rubio’s trip to the Dominican Republic in early February as part of a five-country tour of Central America and the Caribbean, his first abroad as the United States’ top diplomat.

The Dominican government has largely acted as a willing partner for the Trump administration’s goals in the region, particularly toward Venezuela, recently following the U.S. lead by declaring the “Cartel de los Soles” a foreign terrorist organization; seizing a presidential plane purportedly used by Maduro; and carrying out its first joint operation with the U.S. against “narco-terrorism” in the Caribbean that allegedly yielded 1,000 kilos of cocaine from one of the three speedboats recently destroyed by U.S. military airstrikes.

“The year’s Summit of the Americas will serve as Secretary Rubio’s platform to showcase his loyal, subservient states. The countries that want to protest won’t do so as openly as they did in the past. Instead, they will send their foreign ministers,” Emanuele said. “The problem with this belligerent and harmful policy of the Trump administration is that it drains forums like the Summit of the Americas of their substance, turning them into little more than tools of their own agenda to reassert hegemony in the region.”