MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

ALBA summit takes off celebrating a frustrated 1992 military coup by Chavez

President Chavez receives Raul Castro (L) in Caracas

Cuban president Raul Castro arrived on Friday to Caracas for the XI summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of America, ALBA, and to participate in the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the frustrated military coup by then a young Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chavez, currently Venezuelan president.

Castro was received at the airport by President Hugo Chavez, the mastermind behind the ALBA initiative which includes besides the two countries, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia and several Caribbean island states.

On 4 February 1992 Chavez and a group of young officers organized a coup against twice democratically elected president Carlos Andres Perez, taking advantage he was overseas, but which turned ugly with hundreds killed and with the scared rebel leader turning in. Chavez was imprisoned for two years and later granted amnesty.

The Venezuelan Foreign Affairs ministry said that besides Castro, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega have confirmed their attendance to the two-day summit together with Haiti president Michel Martelly who will be participating as an ‘observer’.

Venezuelan sources anticipate that Martelly will formally request to join the ALBA group as ‘full member’ during the summit.

Caribbean member states include Saint Vincent & Grenadines, Dominica and Antigua and Barbuda.

Among the issues to be discussed at the summit is the performance of the SUCRE (regional compensation system) which is an accountancy unit created to compensate trade among the group eliminating the use of international currencies such as the dollar, Euro and Yuan.

Members will also have to agree the name of an ‘economic coordinator’ for the ALBA group agreed in 2010.

“We are the most advanced unitary platform in the world, and now from the political we move to the economic sphere, creating an ALBA economic zone”, anticipated Chavez ahead of the summit during one of his radio broadcasts.

ALBA created back in 2004, initially by Venezuela and Cuba to counter the US sponsored Free Trade Association of the Americas, is basically kept together besides ideology by the oil dollars of Venezuela, which President Chavez distributes generously in search of political support.