Cuba Playing Host to Third World Summit

Private jets and airliners from nations far and near brought a steady stream of presidents, politburo members and parliamentarians to Cuba on Monday, setting the stage for a landmark Third World event.

It wasn’t quite on a par with the expected arrival of a single 6-year-old boy. But it was an encouraging start to a week that most of Cuba’s 11 million people hope will finally bring to a close the custody battle over Elian Gonzalez, whose return from Miami has become a national obsession.

The occasion for the visits of about 60 heads of state and more than 150 delegations to Havana this week was planned long before Elian was found lashed to an inner tube off the Florida coast last Thanksgiving Day after an illegal smuggler’s voyage from Cuba that killed his mother and 10 other people.

The Cuban government Monday sought for the first time in months to push the Elian affair from center stage in order to focus on one of the largest gatherings ever of developing nations.

The South Summit of the Group of 77 will seek ways to redress inequities between the world’s richest and poorest lands, and it is likely to be a clear show of global solidarity with Cuba’s aging President Fidel Castro, who has made Elian’s return from distant relatives in America a personal and ideological crusade.

Castro regards charting a new course for the Third World far into the future and seeking ways to redistribute global wealth to better benefit the poor as another of his missions.

Among the dignitaries expected to be here before Castro hosts the G-77’s first heads-of-state session beginning Wednesday are Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Pakistani military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, South African President Thabo Mbeki and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, a friend of Castro’s.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said Monday that 133 member-nation delegations will focus on ways to share with the world’s impoverished majority the benefits of high technology and a globalized economy that now largely serve the world’s wealthy minority. He added that more than two dozen nonmember developed nations, including the United States, will participate in negotiations to improve relations between poorer and richer countries.

To illustrate, Perez Roque asserted that in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to 10% of the world’s population, less than 0.1% of the people have access to the Internet. He added that in the 36 years since the Group of 77 was founded as a negotiating body within the United Nations, 20% of the world’s population has become 20 times richer.

The major themes of the summit appear to mirror many of those Castro has stressed in his “battle” for Elian, focusing on a broad struggle between the material temptations of Cuba’s capitalist neighbor 90 miles to the north and the traditional socialist values Elian left behind.

But after months of angry rhetoric and harsh speeches, Perez Roque played down the conflict Monday at an opening-day news conference with about 500 journalists from 80 nations.

“Elian cannot come to the summit. He’s too young,” Perez Roque quipped before briefly restating that he hoped the boy will be home as soon as possible--then asking reporters to confine their questions to the summit.

For most Cubans, the government kept the struggle for Elian on the front burner.

Images of Castro greeting the leaders of nations both powerful and obscure filled state-run television throughout the day and night. But the daily 5 to 7 p.m. time slot, which switched from American cartoons to Elian coverage several months ago, was still devoted to microanalyses from Havana’s top journalists and legal experts of incremental efforts in the U.S. to bring the boy home.