Havana and Davos

The Second International Economic Conference held in Havana on  January 24-28 coincided with the gathering of the world’s most conspicuous capitalists and their political handlers – with a debauched, end-of-the road Clinton leading the band – at their annual jamboree in Davos. Giant corporate money representing the planets’ biggest TNCs that dominate the international economy, with their public relations touts, and an army of lubricious lawyers flocked to the alpine resort. They celebrated the ascendancy, past and present, of neo-liberalism or far more accurately the imperialist rape, pillaging and non-stop mega TNC exploitation of the world’s resources and its peoples. In all ways, Havana and Davos signalise two wholly divergent and opposed strategies of world economic order.

The Havana conference was sponsored by the Asociacion Nacional de Economistas de America, attended by more than 1300 delegates from 60 countries engulfing a vast spectrum of economic thought: neo-liberals from many of the Ivy League universities, structuralists, Keynesians, ecologists, marxists, spokesmen of the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and 16 international organisations and NGOs. The most controversial of themes were the subject of intense debates with no holds barred. Several TNC executives were invited including Soros and the likes of George Friedman and others of their breed. For some, Havana was simply uncongenial.