Leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement of 116 developing nations will meet in Cuba this week for a summit that will gather some of the United States' fiercest critics jusst 90 miles (145 km) offshore.
The presidents of Iran and Syria, countries the Bush administration sees as members of an "axis of evil," are expected in Havana, as well as a high-ranking delegation from another, North Korea.
Washington's longest-lasting ideological foe, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, is not believed to be strong enough to chair the September 11-16 summit, but he will host a dinner on Friday for heads of delegations, according to an updated schedule for press coverage issued by Cuba.
Emergency intestinal surgery in July for an undisclosed illness forced the 80-year-old Castro to turn over power to his younger brother, Raul, and left him 41 pounds (18 kilos) thinner.
His main leftist ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, is seen as the political heir who will take up Castro's role of assailing Western capitalism in the name of the world's poor.
"Chavez may well become the star of the show," said Riordan Roett, director of Western Hemisphere Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington. "He will certainly use it as an anti-American platform."
"Part of the color, though, will be lost if Fidel can't give one of his three- to four-hour rousing speeches," Roett said.
The NAM, which groups almost two-thirds of the member states of the United Nations, is expected to endorse Iran's nuclear energy program after Tehran ignored an August 31 UN Security Council deadline to stop enriching uranium, a process that could yield atomic bombs.
The developing nations will criticize US sanctions against Communist-run Cuba, according to a draft of the final document that is still under negotiation.
COLD WAR RELIC:
The summit may serve to revive peace efforts between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region.
Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are due to hold their first meeting in a year on the sidelines and could restart ministerial-level talks frozen in the wake of the Mumbai bombings in July.
The NAM was founded in Belgrade in 1961 by Third World leaders such as India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser and Indonesia's Achmad Sukarno, under the aegis of Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito, to try to avoid alignment with either the United States or the Soviet Union.
But since the Cold War ended, the movement has struggled to find a purpose. Experts say the movement is handicapped today by historical, cultural and religious divisions.
"It's a relic of the Cold War. Allowing Cuba to head the movement again indicates that it is pretty irrelevant, particularly under an ailing Fidel or an aging Raul," Roett said.