The Venezuelan ruler Nicholas Maduro Moors announced that he will ask the United States authorities to grant him and his wife visas, cilia floresto attend a Puerto Rican salsa festival in New York City
“I’m asking for my visa to go to New York, to the Puerto Rican Salsa Festival in New York. On June 11thCilia and I are leaving, straight to New York. Are you expecting me in New York? I like New York very much. I know New York very well. I rode a lot in New York, didn’t I, Cilia?” the Bolivarian leader explained on Futuro TV’s La Hora de la Salsa show this Friday.
The remarks were met with laughter from the program’s interviewers, who perhaps saw irony in the words of the Venezuelan dictator, who assured that he would apply for a visa by June 11, the day after Summit of the Americasto which everything indicates that he will not be invited.
Traditionally, June 12th is celebrated in the United States with the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, a party held along Fifth Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York.
The parade, which attracts many Puerto Rican celebrities and politicians from the tri-state area, is held on the second Sunday in June to honor Puerto Rico’s 3.2 million residents and all residents of there who are of birth or ancestry from “the continental United States” .
The Summit of the Americas, scheduled to take place June 6-10 in the city of Los Angeles, remains embroiled in the controversy over the states that will eventually be invited, an unknown that weighs mainly on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, but has caused the rejection of the possible veto of these dictatorships by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The United States, which has again hosted the first Summit in Miami in 1994, has expressed the Biden administration’s desire for the Americas Summit to pay particular attention to cooperation among Western Hemisphere governments on issues such as Migration and human rights, which the Cuban regime has little to be proud of.
“Surely they won’t be there”, US Undersecretary for Hemisphere Affairs Brian A. Nichols recently pointed out to a group of journalists. The official reiterated that the summit will focus on democratic governments in the western hemisphere.
“Cuba, Nicaragua and the regime of (Nicolás) Maduro do not respect America’s democratic charter and therefore I do not expect your presence,” Nichols told NTN 24 days later.
However, officials in President Joe Biden’s administration said this Friday that they would consider doing so invite a Cuban representative to the summitto avoid a potentially embarrassing boycott by some regional leaders.
Discussion has focused on allowing a Cuban presence at the Los Angeles summit below the level of the country’s president or foreign minister, but it is at an early stage and no decision has been made, a source told Reuters.
While the dictatorships of Cuba and Venezuela use the alleged veto of the United States on their participation in the conclave as a tool of agitation and propaganda against their supporters, their leaders – as in the case of Maduro – allow themselves to joke about it.
The sarcastic tone of the Venezuelan President should be emphasized the need for the “historic enemy” (the United States) to consolidate its regional alliances given the geostrategic threat of Russia’s proximity to these countries at the present time, given the invasion of Ukraine.
“To the south of New York lies little Italy, ‘little Italy’. There they sell world spaghetti. And Chinatown and Manhattan and the Dominican Quarter and the Puerto Rican Quarter. That’s where I spent it, on the streets of New York. Greetings to all good people of the United States of America. We love the United States of America. What we have for America is love. LOVE,” Maduro said in his sudden outburst of love to “the Empire” this Friday.