Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos criticized the U.S. and Organization of American States’ embargo against Cuba Saturday during his opening speech at the sixth Summit of the Americas in Cartagena.
According to Santos, whose government is hosting the summit, “The isolation, the embargo, the indifference and the looking the other way have shown their ineffectiveness. In today’s world there is no justification for this. It is an anachronism that keeps us chained to a cold war era that was overcome decades ago already.”
Colombia’s president said a seventh summit without Cuba “would be unacceptable.”
Santos advised his fellow heads of state to “overcome the paralysis brought on by ideological stubbornness and to seek a minimal consensus” to promote as what Santos perceived as a “process of change” carried out on the Caribbean island.
The United States imposed an embargo on Cuba following a Communist revolution in 1960. The Organization of American States, whose member states take part in the summit, banned Cuba from its meetings in 1962.