The International Journal of Cuban Studies Issue 2 December 2008
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CUBAN STUDIES (Print) ISSN 1756-3461
(Online) ISSN 1756-347X
www.cubastudiesjournal.org
ALBA: a process of concientización Ken Cole Summary In the 19th century both José Martí and Simón Bolívar warned of United States’ intent to assume dominion over Latin America. In the globalized world of the 21st century the proposal for La Área de Libre Comercio de las Americas (ALCA) – The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) – would have secured US power over the Latin American economy and polity. This initiative expired at the Vth Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata (Argentina) in 2005 when Latin American political leaders failed to ratify ALCA. ALBA – the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and the Caribbean – is an alternative integration process founded on complementarity, solidarity, cooperation, human dignity, respect for social diversity – rather than competition, domination, exploitation, corporate rule and economic expediency. The author argues that this process is as much one of political concientización (1) as of economic institutional organization.
Introduction In his address to nearly a million people massed in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana on 4 February 1962, to protest at the US-inspired decision to exclude Cuba from the nascent Organization of American States, Fidel Castro pronounced: “No nation in Latin America is weak – because each forms part of a family of 200 million brothers, who suffer the same miseries, who harbor the same sentiments, who have the same energy, who dream about the same future and who count upon the solidarity of all honest men and women throughout the world.’” (Castro 1962: 21) José Martí’s dream of Nuestra América (Our America), originally published in newspapers in New York and Mexico City in January 1891, was reawakened, defining an internationalist conception of social change, which has characterized post-1959 Cuban revolutionary praxis. Such a commitment is celebrated in the 21st century in the establishment of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and the Caribbean (ALBA). In the incipient nineteenth century, as Spanish colonial power waned, Simón Bolívar declared: “I am of the opinion that until we centralize our American governments, our enemies will gain irreversible advantages” (Bolívar 1812: 7). Bolívar attempted to unite Latin America, warning that the United States would assume the mantle of Spanish dominion: “…[the United States] seems destined by Providence to plague America with miseries in the name of freedom” (Bolívar ALBA: a process of concientización. Ken Cole
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