South America with flags. patrice6000/Shutterstock. All rights reserved.Since its rather humble beginnings, Latin America’s regional integration has made substantial progress towards establishing Simon Bolivar’s dream of La Patria Grande in the contemporary context. Its first tentative steps were meetings between Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro in Havana that began in December 1994 before the former was elected to the presidency of Venezuela. This relation turned out to be strategic since building a united Latin America free from US domination has been a central objective of the Cuban Revolution since 1959.
As a result of these meetings between Fidel and Hugo, ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) was established on 14 December 2004 around a Cuba-Venezuela agreement to exchange 96,000 barrels of oil per day for 20,000 health workers, most of them medical doctors. Both leaders conceived ALBA as an alternative to ALCA (FTAA) advocated by George W. Bush. At its inception in 2004 ALBA had only two members: Cuba and Venezuela. By 2005, Argentina and Brazil had elected left-wing governments who together with Venezuela and other administrations in the region managed to sink the ALCA project at the Summit of the Americas held in Mar del Plata, Argentina in 2005.
ALBA is the most radical manifestation of the integration process and it is made up of eleven countries: Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Ecuador, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, and Grenada; additionally, Surinam and Haiti have been granted special status. ALBA is based on the idea of regional integration based on the principles of solidarity, social justice, complementarity, and cooperation aimed at transforming geopolitical relations in the western hemisphere.
