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Yahoo!
August 19, 2002.
Brand-Name U.S. Food Arrives in Cuba
Mon Aug 19, 9:25 AM ET
The first brand-name American food sold directly to Cuba in more than four
decades arrived on the island this weekend — a 132-ton shipment of butter,
margarine and cereals.
The load, which arrived Sunday, is the first half of a $750,000 order Cuba
placed with Marsh Supermarkets Inc. of Indianapolis for its Marsh brand
products. The second half of the order is expected to arrive later this month.
With the shipment, Cuba now has purchased about 770,000 tons of American
food worth about $125 million since the communist government started taking
advantage of a U.S. law easing the 40-year-old American trade embargo to allow
direct food sales.
The new shipment was the first of packaged goods bearing a brand name —
Marsh's. Past deliveries have been of bulk commodities, including apples,
onions, corn, rice, wheat, soy, poultry, vegetable oil, eggs and pork lard.
Cuba could buy as much as 70 percent of all its imported food from the
United States if it could get financing for the deals, said Pedro Alvarez, the
head of Cuba's import food agency Alimport. Currently, it must pay cash for U.S.
food.
Cuba annually imports about $1 billion in food, mostly from Europe, Asia and
Latin America, Alvarez said.
U.S. lawmakers from farm states are pushing to end a ban on American
financing of the sales to make it easier to sell to Cuba.
But President Bush has said he will veto any more efforts to ease existing
sanctions until Cuba undertakes economic and political reform.
Cuba woos heart of U.S. with trade: Prospects for agribusiness have some
questioning embargo
Sun Aug 18, 6:36 Am Et. Craig Gilbert, of the
Journal Sentinel staff.
Washington - Green Bay meatpacker Carl Kuehne has his eye on a new customer.
His name is Fidel Castro.
Along with hundreds of other executives from America's food and agribusiness
industry, Kuehne will head to Cuba next month for the biggest U.S. trade show in
the Communist regime's 43-year history.
"It's absolutely a great, ideal market for some of our high-value
items," Kuehne said of the island's budding resort sector.
But if American companies are warming to Cuba, the Bush administration is
not.
"It represents a trap," Otto J. Reich, assistant secretary of
state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said in an interview Thursday.
Full story at Milwaukee Journal
Cuba Hosts First Rap Festival
By VIVIAN SEQUERA, Associated Press Writer. Fri Aug 16,
3:20 PM ET
HAVANA (AP) - Voicing the frustrations of Cuba's urban youth, local
musicians followed the lead of American rap pioneers as they opened a festival
slamming the police with an irreverence rarely expressed here publicly.
"Police, police you are not my friend," 18-year-old Humberto
Cabrera, a soloist known as Papa Humbertico, sang as the 8th annual rap festival
got under way Thursday night. "For Cuban youth, you are the worst nightmare
... you are the criminal ... I detest you."
The Cuban duo Alto Voltaje — High Voltage — also sang out against
the police and of boredom of Cuban youth.
"I'm tired of the routine," sang Alexander Perez and Norlan
Leygonier, both 25. "How long is this going to last?"
They told the audience that on their way to the concert they were stopped by
police officers and asked for their identification — a process they said
Cuban youth experience almost daily.
Because some of their lyrics are critical of Cuba's system, friends and
neighbors "tell us we are crazy," said Perez. "But they keep
following us."
"We sing about what is happening, we sing from the heart," Cabrera
told reporters after the opening concert.
Such outspokenness about the system has been rare in communist Cuba, where
citizens have traditionally practiced a kind of self-censorship, lowering their
voices to a whisper when complaining about the police or other government
officials.
But since the onset of an economic crisis that began when the Soviet Union
collapsed more than a decade ago, the Cuban government has become increasingly
tolerant of complaints about the system as long as they remain generalized.
And unlike their parents and grandparents, who lived through much more
politically rigid periods, Cubans in their teens and 20s are less likely to hold
their tongues about what they see as the system's shortcomings.
The annual festival, which runs through Sunday, features 50 Cuban and 12
foreign rap groups, organizers said.
Several thousand people attended the opening concert at an amphitheater in
the crowded Lamar neighborhood, just east of Havana. Concertgoers paid the
equivalent of about one cent to attend.
The American artists scheduled to perform include the Grammy-winning group
The Roots, along with Dead Prez and Mos Def. Groups from Mexico and Venezuela
also are to perform.
Also confirmed for the festival is Latin rapper Vanesa Diaz, originally from
California.
Diaz has said that the hip-hop movement in Cuba still retains the essence of
the movement's early years in the United Sates — as a vehicle for young
people to express themselves.
Rap's popularity in Cuba grew during the 1990s and has exploded in recent
years to include as many as 500 groups across the island. | 
