Can Cuba and Venezuela help rescue Haiti? Head of US-backed transition is asking

MIAMI — In Cuba the population is fighting shortages of food, fuel and medicine while a collapsing electrical grid that resulted in three nationwide blackouts this year continues to leave many people in the dark.

In Venezuela, strongman Nicolás Maduro is driving the hemisphere’s worst migration crisis — nearly 6 million people have fled and more are threatening to leave amid economic hardships, human rights abuses and a power grab that has him preparing to inaugurate himself for a third six-year term in January.

And in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega and his wife have turned the Central American country into a springboard for fleeing Haitians and other migrants, and the United Nations is scrutinizing government crackdowns against opponents, journalists and human rights defenders.

While none of these countries appear to be in any position financially to help a crisis-wrecked Haiti, the head of its U.S.-backed ruling presidential council, Leslie Voltaire, recently appealed for their help.

In a video addressed to the left-leaning group known as ALBA — the acronym for the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our Americas — Voltaire, who took over the rotating presidency of the Transitional Presidential Council in October, asked for “security and food” assistance on behalf of Haiti, where armed gangs have killed more than 5,000 people this year and forced more than 700,000 to flee their homes.

“We are currently facing a problem of violence from armed gangs who are terrorizing the population,” Voltaire, an urban planner who studied in Mexico and in the U.S., said in a video address in Spanish to the trade bloc as it met over the weekend in Caracas. “That is why we are asking our ALBA brothers for security and food assistance.”

Voltaire’s request to ALBA has caught Haitian and hemispheric observers by surprise, with some questioning if the move is an attempt to raise the stakes with Washington as the U.S. prepares for the Trump administration.

‘Haiti is a mess’

“No doubt Haiti is a mess,” said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas and an expert on the region. “ I’ve been calling it a failed state and I believe it to be. But putting the country in the midst of regional political tug-of-war would not be the best way to advance security and prosperity.”

Farnsworth said Voltaire’s decision is “a bad move” and its timing “rotten and probably intentional,” given the pending U.S. presidential transition. He wouldn’t put it past ALBA leaders, he added, to be behind the request “in order to embarrass the U.S. and polarize the situation.”

“ALBA has nothing to offer, so their best tried-and-true method is to try to work public opinion against the U.S. and hope to cast attention away from their own failures,” Farnsworth said. “Let’s see what if anything ALBA actually comes up with besides, maybe, a show of support with a planeload of supplies or something that isn’t sustained. I doubt that ALBA peacekeepers will be deployed to Haiti any time soon.”

In addition to the three countries, ALBA members include Bolivia and the eastern Caribbean islands of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The island-nations are also members of the 15-member regional bloc known as CARICOM, which on Monday resumed talks with Haitian political leaders over the troubled transition.

Founded by Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, ALBA is known for its ongoing confrontations with the United States. Haiti isn’t a full member, but has observer status. Former President Michel Martelly in 2012 raised the possibility of Haiti permanently joining the alliance.

In his address, Voltaire said six million Haitians are going hungry and he mentioned past assistance from the bloc. After Haiti’s deadly 2010 earthquake, Chávez announced the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in debt the country had accrued and pledged additional assistance.

Voltaire did not respond to a request for comment from the Miami Herald. His outreach to ALBA has been criticized and dismissed in Haiti. Earlier this week Magali Comeau Denis, a leader in the civic group known as the Montana Accord, mentioned the request during a radio interview on station Magik 9. She criticized the lack of leadership from the ruling council, which has been engulfed in a corruption scandal that’s threatening to unravel the transition, which her group pushed.

“There are concrete measures that can be taken, even regarding food,” Denis said, underscoring how gangs control of roads have led to farm products wasting away in parts of the country. “If you go to the market in the Grand’Anse, there is produce — yam, papaya, pineapple, cassava, avocado. The market is full.”

‘ALBA has no money’

After Voltaire’s request, Maduro called on ALBA to “do everything within its power to support Haiti, a nation that has been a victim of aggression, mistreatment, and colonialism in all its forms for centuries.”

Pedro Burelli, a former director at PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company who closely follows the bloc, said “ALBA has no money whatsoever.”

The bloc was created back in 2004 when oil prices were above $100 a barrel. Back then Venezuela was governed by Chávez and the South American nation was a huge donor to Haiti, whose close ties with the country dates back to liberator Simón Bolívar.

Chávez used its PetroCaribe oil program, which provided cheap oil to Caribbean nations, “not as a sensible energy program but as a political influence gambit.”

“At one point, the U.S. and Venezuela held three way meetings with the Haitian government. All that is gone and ALBA is but a shell,” Burelli said.

Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba have all been hit with U.S. economic sanctions and are viewed by Washington as repressive regimes. Each, along with Haiti, presents its own challenges for the incoming Trump administration, which campaigned on deporting massive numbers of undocumented migrants from the U.S.

During his first term, Donald Trump took a hard line against Venezuela and was criticized by its supporters within CARICOM.

It’s unclear this time around what Trump’s approach to Venezuela or any countries in the region will be — although his nominee for secretary of state, Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, has railed against the hemisphere’s authoritarian regimes. President Biden has tried to generate political change through sanctions and engagement, without much success.

Biden record on Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela

In a call with journalists this week on the administration’s foreign policy achievements, Tom Sullivan, the counselor to the State Department, was asked about its record on Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti.

The U.S. is the largest provider of humanitarian aid to Haiti, he said, while acknowledging that there hasn’t been enough progress against gangs by the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission. The U.S. supports the U.N.-approved mission and remains its largest funder, with more than $300 million in assistance that will double before Trump takes office.

The administration is working on solidifying “the progress that has been made” by turning the force into a formal U.N. peacekeeping mission, Sullivan said..

“That will ensure that it has longer-term funding and support and international contribution,” he said. “That is actively being worked in New York through the [Security] Council and with the secretary-general, and we are hopeful that that might happen by early next year through the Council issuing that mandate. So that is the focus that we have been on.”

Sullivan pointed to continuing repression in Cuba and Venezuela.

The regime of Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel, Sullivan said, “has shown no signs of taking steps that we would deem necessary for there to be any sort of constructive or meaningful engagement, apart from some limited areas on law enforcement cooperation on a few other specific issues.”

On Venezuela, the administration has been rallying international support against acknowledging Maduro’s claim to victory in the presidential elections last July. The Venezuelan people cast their ballots for opposition leader Edmundo González “to be their president,” Sullivan said.

“We have recognized Edmundo González as the president elect, to maintain the sanctions that we have, while signaling to the regime that if it wants [a] relationship with the United States... it’s not going to be able to just continue to sort of thwart the will of Venezuelan people and to continue on the current course,” he said.

El Nuevo Herald reporter Antonio Maria Delgado contributed to this report.