Havana today becomes the capital of integration, unity, and consensus, as high level representatives from ten member countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People’s Trade Agreement meet in the city’s International Conference Center.

ALBA-TCP is important at a time when “dark forces long for the return of neocolonialism, because division came to our continent with colonialism, along with racism, the culture of division, and war.”These were the words expressed by David Choquehuanca, secretary general of Alliance, in an interview with Prensa Latina.

During the Summit, regional leaders will commemorate the bloc’s foundational moment, December 14, 2004, and the group’s initiators, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, “two visionary brothers,” Choquehuanca stated, who “decided to construct an unprecedented integration mechanism to address all issues, not only trade, but construct brotherhood, unity, hope, peace.”

On his Twitter account, President Díaz-Canel reaffirmed Cuba’s commitment to strengthening Latin American and Caribbean integration.

This past November, the XVII session of the ALBA Political Council met in Managua, Nicaragua, where the commitment was reiterated to work for Latin American and Caribbean unity, strengthening this unity within diversity.

This body agreed to hold the Summit in Havana, an emblematic site for regional integration, where the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace was approved by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) on January 29, 2014, the principles of which are more relevant now than ever.