Cuba Split Leaves Summit Without Declaration A summit of nearly 30 Western Hemisphere leaders has ended without a joint declaration due to divisions over Cuba and Argentine claims to the Falkland Islands. "There is no declaration because there is no consensus," said Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos as the summit's closing news conference. Washington, backed by Canada, stood fast against widespread demands to include in the meeting's final declaration language specifying that Cuba be included in future hemispheric summits. They had also balked at backing Argentina's claims to the British-held Falkland Islands. All the countries here in Latin American and the Caribbean want Cuba to be present. But the United States won't accept," President Evo Morales of Bolivia told reporters late Saturday. It's like a dictatorship. Morales and other leftist leaders have been insistent that this weekend's meeting in this Caribbean colonial port, which wrapped up at midday, will be the last regional summit under Organization of American States auspices unless Cuba is invited in the future. But Santos said the leaders agreed to meet again in 2015 in Panama. "Hopefully within three years we can have Cuba" at the summit, Santos said. President Barack Obama, front center, gestures during the official photo at the sixth Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, Sunday April 15, 2012. Obama is flanked by Presidents Sebastian Pinera of Chile, front left, and Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala, front right. Pictured behind the three leaders are Presidents Porfirio Lobo of Honduras, middle row, left, Felipe Calderon of Mexico, middle row, second from left, Ricardo Martinelli of Panama, middle row, right, and Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, third row, center. U.S. President Barack Obama's peers lectured him Saturday over his unflagging opposition to Cuban participation due to U.S. objections to the communist-governed Caribbean island's lack of democracy. But a senior U.S. administration official said in a briefing for White House reporters Saturday evening that the subject did not come up in any of Obama's brief meetings on the summit's sidelines with the leaders of Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina and Peru. The foreign ministers of Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay had said their presidents won't sign any declaration unless the U.S. and Canada remove their veto of future Cuban participation. The Cuba issue led Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa to boycott the summit, and Nicaragua's leftist President Daniel Ortega also sat out the meeting, though he offered no explanation. Venezuela's cancer-stricken president Hugo Chavez also was absent. He flew Saturday not from Venezuela to Cuba, where he has been undergoing radiation therapy. Even moderates such as Santos of Colombia and Brazil's Dilma Rousseff said there should be no more America's summits without the communist island. The Obama administration has greatly eased family travel and remittances to Cuba, but has not dropped the half-century U.S. embargo against the island. U.S. commercial and political influence in the region has been in decline as China gains on the U.S. as a top trading partner, and many analysts say these regional summits tend to be unwieldy and only make sense if they are a departure for serious follow-up on substantive issues. "The label 'Americas' doesn't seem to mean that much anymore unless you're a cartographer," said analyst Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America. A splintering of old alliances due to region and ideology has cost the OAS clout and, many analysts say, relevance. The main alternative summits, such as the Latin America-Caribbean group and the IberoAmerican session, exclude both The United States and Canada.