This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 9, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As the Summit of the Americas gets underway, the agenda is unclear.

Cato Institute's Juan Carlos Adagu argues that the meeting should be an opportunity to

re-evaluate the US-led international war on drugs.

Instead, he says it may just serve as a way for the Venezuelan government to Grantstand.

Well, this summit stopped to be important a while ago.

You know, at some point there were discussions to create a free trade area of the Americas which was a

goal shared by basically almost all of the countries in the hemisphere but that plan was aborted in 2005 when President Hugo Chavez, then President

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela basically a rally against the project and he gathered the support of other left-wing governments in the

region like Brazil and Argentina and so on.

Since then, these summits are just talking jobs.

In this particular case, there is a lot of expectation about the approachment,

for approachment between Cuba and the United States. The United States is the one administration is going to

take Cuba off the list of states that sponsor terrorism so there is a lot of

expectation on what's going to be the dynamics, the personal dynamics between President

Obama and Raoul Castro, the dictator of Cuba.

This is the first time that Cuba is going to attend a summit of the America.

So all the attention is around that.

And also, the attention is around the increasing tensions

between the United States and Venezuela.

Let's remember that the Obama administration imposed sanctions on seven individuals,

...