Havana, June 10 (RHC)-- Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel reiterated his government's willingness to promote collaboration with the members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People's Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP).

During a virtual meeting with representatives of the member nations of ALBA, the Cuban president called for an exchange of experiences within the organization to face the consequences of COVID-19 in the region.

"We offer to provide advice for facing new challenges in the epidemiological field and we'll make the Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine available to all ALBA countries as a consultant in this area," said the president.

Cuba maintains its commitment to promote and expand collaboration on the public health front within the alliance, he emphasized.  "We must identify the potential of each one in terms of economic and regional integration that prioritizes complementarity, with each country producing what is most competitive and exchanging goods and services," he said.

In this context, the president rejected the effects of the economic and financial siege by the United States for threatening the development of nations such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.  

"Since the beginning of the year, we have witnessed a painful kind of global political economy every time the ports were closed, every plane that did not find a landing strip, every financial speculation to obtain medicines or means of protection that everyone needs," he denounced.

This policy, he said, is an expression of selfishness and injustice of a system whose only purpose is to enrich minorities at the expense of the suffering of the majority.  "Even though a global impact is foreseen, no one disputes that those who will suffer most from the consequences of the crisis are the nations of the South."

These nations carry the heavy burden of underdevelopment, indebtedness and unilateral coercive measures, imposed in the context of an unjust international order that compromises the sustainable development of their peoples.

The virtual meeting of ALBA-TCP, promoted by the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, analyzed the complex regional and global economic situation due to the effects of the pandemic.  And participants during the video-conference offered opinions and proposals to jointly face the economic challenges.