VERSION en Español Aquí
The leaders of the governments of Spain, Mexico and Brazil issued the following communication during the course of their IV Cumbre en Defensa de la Democracia [IV Summit in Defense of Democracy] which was held in Barcelona 16-17April 2026. The Communication, On the situation in Cuba, follows reports that the President of Mexico was seeking to develop a common position.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Saturday during the IV Summit in Defense of Democracy in Barcelona that she will propose a formal declaration opposing any military intervention in Cuba, urging dialogue and peace to prevail over confrontation amid U.S. threats and energy blockade. “To this day, speaking of that small Caribbean island, we believe that no people are small, but rather great and stoic when defending their sovereignty and the right to a fulfilling life,” she added. Speaking at the opening of the gathering convened by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Sheinbaum made her call before a dozen progressive leaders including the presidents of Colombia, South Africa, and Uruguay The Mexican president used her address to reaffirm that her country’s
constitutional foreign policy principles remain fully relevant in the
current global landscape. She cited non-intervention, respect for
self-determination, peaceful dispute resolution, rejection of force,
legal equality among states, and the enduring pursuit of peace as
pillars of Mexico’s diplomatic identity. She warned against any definition of freedom that implies submission
to external interests or reduces sovereign nations to the status of
modern colonies, insisting that liberty holds no meaning without social
justice, sovereignty, and the dignity of peoples. (here)
The language does not deviate form a position that the Mexicans have taken from the start of the current crisis in Cuba, its elements already part of discourse of President Sheinbaum in the wake of the U.S. action in Venezuela at the start of 2026. The three elements are (1) the centrality of humanitarian aid and the minimization of popular suffering, (2) sovereign equality and territorial integrity; and (3) respect for human rights, multilateralism within the context of the UN system, and respectful dialog.
The three elements, interestingly enough are shared by the United States. The problem, of course, is that the meaning that these common principles and the text used to express them of the terms and the values with which they are invested separate the United States from Mexico, Spain and Brasil as much as the common text appears to join them in a common project. The United States centers humanitarian aid on direct aid to the people of Cuba administered through non-governmental organizations, and has made efforts in that respect; traditional Latin American institutionalist cognitive premises would assess and operationalize that aid through State organs and make an effort not to be too judgy about efficiencies or strategic choices respecting distribution (a problem repeated elsewhere, e.g., in MENA and Africa). The United States is also positive about sovereign equality and territorial integrity; that focus is shaped by the transactionalism of the America First Initiative, Both share a strong distaste for territorial ambitions (with some exceptions. . . there are always exceptions). Transactionalists, however, accept the premise that projections, including violent projections into another State may be necessary, and advantageous, within the ambit of their reading of the "rules" of internal law frameworks. Institutionalists tend to see no difference between outward projections of power into another state and territorial stress--whether it is freely roaming over the skies of a state (Iran, Lebanon, etc. as part of efforts to negotiate substantially important changes in relations where there is no innocence on the part of the state onto which such power is projected strategically) or projecting military power to extract persons (in the case if Venezuela characterized as part of a criminal gang by the projecting state) and a Russian style invasion if another country for the purpose of annexing territory. The last, of course is the most problematic for the U.S. in the sense
that it is intended by the old institutionalist order. The US
understanding of multilateralism as inter-governmentalism is ironically
closer to the traditional Brazilian and Chinese position than that of
the old US elites or that of Mexico and Spain--except as seen in the
communication as discourse.
More generally, the terms that form the core of the communication themselves are not just larded with ambiguity, their precision depends in large part on the orienting cognitive premises within which it is possible to develop communal agreement as the the values inherent in those terms and the intentions that they embody where a state seeks to rely in their meaning to act or refrain from acting. And of course, the nature of those terms is distinctly meaningful in the Global South, especially in Latin America, in ways that may not resonate either the US or China; except as perhaps as text. Those differences were nicely elaborated in the speech of President Sheinbaum before the Summit leaders, the video of which may be accessed below the image that follows.
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| Pix and video posted to YouTube HERE |
At its core, then, the text of the communication invites its reader to embrace a community of meaning and meaning making that permits only one orthodox reading of its sense of itself, and only one orthodox application of its pronouncements--without the bother of exposing those premises or debating their form and interpretation. That is fair; it is also politics; and it goes to the broader and much more important contest of the control of any sort of collective meaning and from leaning expectations of behavior, and which is acknowledged, is only visible in the margins and between the lines of text. That contest, in turn, in its current form, has a very very long history; and the likelihood of its decisive resolution is fantasy (though one that helps fuel the intensity of belief necessary to manage and deploy the foot soldiers of each of these camps). For all that it is still important. It us important for the way it suggests a perhaps substantial difference in ordering premises between the Global South in Latin America (built on the richness of its own experiences and desires as they perceive them, or at least as their elites perceive them) and those of the United States and China. The latter two increasingly align though from fundamentally different starting points, and that alignment increasingly marks a gap between the Latin American South and the two apex powers.
None of this, of course, will have a substantial effect on the resolution of the Cuban crisis; and that suggests that even substantial and fundamental differences in the way in which the ordering if reality as a function of premises and values will be softened by pragmatism. In that it is telling that Mexico has been leading this endeavor, continuing to play a discursive and normative long game beyond Cuba even as it bends to the realities of the situation in which it finds itself in this stage of the region's historical development (consider remarks of President Sheinbaum Cumbre en Defensa de la Democracia: Presidenta propone programa global de reforestación y declaración contra intervención militar en Cuba). But it is a pragmatism that, for their own reasons cannot be shared by the current leaders of Spain and Brazil, each of which has their own and quite distinct (and not irrational) agendas and historical baggage. And here, the discourse of international law and humanitarian intervention, garnished with the tropes of sovereign equality and territorial integrity within dense normative frameworks of multilateral constraints that are meant to have supra-constitutional (and thus legal) effect (of some kind) will have to confront a perhaps equally interesting problem of the management of systems of collectivized States (whether from an transactional or institutional structural framework)--the problem of failed states and the duties of either the collective of states (however organized and conceived) or of some of their elements, to take responsibility (whatever that means). It is in this latter respect that much of the discourse speaks to, if only obliquely--and that, of course is the fundamental problem. It is a critical ideological and cognitive problem for the governments of Mexico, Spain, and Brasil precisely because, to some greater or lesser extent, any admission respecting State failure in Cuba would (or could) weaken the normative power of the ideologies that are both shared among them and central to the advancing of their own normative orthodoxies both within their own countries and as the orthodox foundation of international ordering. To protect Cuba against its failures of its own government is, in that respect and to some extent, a protection of their own normative legitimacy. Or so they might be inclined to think. . . (Cf., here, here, and here especially from the Cuban side).
All the same, through the transactional lens of the US, to which much of this is directed, the discursive performance will have consequences for the relations between these four states in ways that are not yet clear--except that relations between the US and Spain and Brazil are likely to get worse before they get better (absent a change of government); those with Mexico will remain pragmatic and transactional, and it is likely that it will be Mexico that will be most effective in serving as an intermediary and bridge to other states. And those changes will substantially affect relations with both Europe, but more importantly China, as perhaps the current government of Spain has sought to demonstrate, inadvertently of course, as it seeks to live the values of its government. In that latter case it may be worth considering the parallelism between the maverick politics of Mr. Orban in Hungary and that of Mr. Sanchez in Spain (Move Over, Hungary: Spain Is China’s New Best Friend in the EU). If they are mimetic, that points both to its importance, as well as its longevity where either is out of sync with larger and more powerful cognitive movements among the organs of collectivized states.
The text of the Communication follows below.
