Published Friday, June 29, 2001 in
The Miami Herald
Cuba: Sugar harvest smaller, but will yield more income
HAVANA -- (AP) -- The latest sugar harvest was smaller than previous ones,
but will yield far more income because of higher prices on the world market, the
government announced Friday.
Cuban Sugar Minister Ulises Rosales de Toro told reporters that the
2000-2001 harvest yielded 3.5 million metric tons, down from 4.05 million during
the 1999-2000 harvest.
But "we are delivering more,'' he said, because sugar now is fetching 9
U.S. cents a pound, compared with 5 cents during the last harvest.
Officials originally had projected a yield of 3.7 million metric tons for
the harvest that just wrapped up. But it was slowed, first by drought, then by
usually heavy rains.
Sugar was once the primary pillar of this communist nation's economy, and
such disappointing production in the past would have been cause for government
alarm.
But Cuba has diversified its economy somewhat since losing its former
socialist financial partners and preferential trade with the collapse of the
former Soviet Union a decade ago.
It has especially developed tourism, now the country's No. 1 hard currency
earner.
Sugar, however, remains an important income source and its size and profits
remain a crucial yardstick for measuring the Cuban economy's health.
Plotter of Bay of Pigs, Watergate conspirator: 'File and forget' Castro
By Carol Rosenberg. crosenberg@herald.com. Published
Thursday, June 28, 2001
Years before he hired some Cuban exiles to break into the Watergate complex
for the president's men, E. Howard Hunt was on the CIA payroll plotting the
downfall of Fidel Castro.
So was the soldier-turned-screenwriter, spy-master-turned-publicist,
federal-convict-turned-thriller-writer glued to his television Saturday for
reports on Castro's widely watched wobble?
Nope.
Hunt says Washington should put Castro in the "file and forget'' basket
-- and make clear to Cubans still clinging to their dreams here that "we
didn't have the cojones to follow through. It's not your fault. It's our fault.
And we aren't going to do a reprise.''
He would know. During his 20-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency,
he was an architect of the Bay of Pigs invasion under the Eisenhower presidency
and saw it scaled down to disaster by the Kennedy White House.
Later, after he left the CIA and became a Washington publicist, he took on a
part-time consultancy with the Nixon White House that segued into his most
notorious mission: Watergate co-conspirator.
He recruited the so-called "plumbers'' to break in to the Democratic
National Committee at the Watergate apartment complex in 1972.
OFF THE SUBJECT
Why? It's a chapter of his life that Hunt chose not to discuss the other
morning over a breakfast of blueberry pancakes at a North Miami diner, leaning
close to converse when his hearing aids didn't help.
"That was an incident in my life, a moment of history that means much
more to other people than it does to me,'' said Hunt, who was indicted and
pleaded guilty to conspiracy.
It got him a 35-year sentence that in the end lasted 33 months in 13 jails.
Since "I sat in prison with them,'' he said, he has not seen the men
who were caught by Washington, D.C., police outside the DNC office in suits and
white gloves.
But, like many of the burglars, he considers Miami home.
Hunt, who says he is 83, raised two children in Biscayne Park with his wife,
Laura, a schoolteacher.
Their youngest, a daughter of 17, is at a Maryland prep school.
So he uses e-mail to keep up with his six kids, four from his first
marriage.
But he is no longer writing thrillers. At last count (and Hunt says even he
doesn't have a copy of each of his paperbacks), he wrote "about 80'' books,
he said.
He quit the thrillers three years ago. A seven-week hospitalization for a
gall bladder problem left him realizing he could no longer sit through six-hour
writing stints, he said.
Instead, he is watching James Bond movies these days to borrow on his
two-decade CIA career and co-write an upcoming survey of films about the
fictional British spy with a Canadian writer.
He also sat recently for hours of videotaped interviews, recalling his 1940s
career as a Hollywood screenwriter, for an upcoming TV documentary on AMC, the
American Movie Classics channel.
Hunt, who had his voting rights restored by Florida's then-Gov. Bob Graham,
a Democrat, is still a devoted Republican.
His dismissed Janet Reno's record as "a total disaster,'' but said he "wouldn't
mind'' if she unseated Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
"We need a colorful negative figure to throw brickbats on,'' he said.
POLITICAL PUNDIT
Besides, he added, Bush might lose because of Florida's "multicultural''
politics, which, Hunt said, made Bush look weak when Miami State Sen. Kendrick
Meek and Jacksonville Rep. Tony Hill staged an affirmative action sit-in at the
governor's office in January 2000.
"What's he got a bodyguard for? What's he got a state militia for? Get
those geeks out of there!'' he said.
He doesn't talk about Castro that way anymore. He says Fidel is firmly in
control of Cuba because of "lethargy on the part of the Cubans and
indecision on the part of the West.''
Hunt separately dismissed the embargo -- and talk of lifting it -- as "nonsense,''
saying the only way to topple the regime would be to use the Cuban Missile
Crisis as a model and "ring the damn island and not let anything go in or
out.''
There's no will for that.
He also scorned the notion that U.S. taxpayers should pay to jail, some
perhaps for life, five Cuban intelligence agents convicted of spying in South
Florida. Washington should trade "those five klutzes'' for exiles held in
Cuban jails, he said, ridiculing the agents as "capering around and
tiptoeing and doing mock espionage, not the real thing.''
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 
