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CUBA
NEWS
Yahoo!
Station Halts Show After Castro Meeting
MIAMI, 19 (AP) - A Spanish-language television
station has stopped broadcasting the program
of an Argentine actor because he met with
Cuban President Fidel Castro last week,
channel officials said.
WDLP-TV took Guillermo Francella's comedy
show off the air until he describes his
stance on the Castro government, station
officials said Thursday. The program is
recorded in Francella's native Argentina,
where it is still broadcast.
The majority of South Florida's Spanish
speakers are Cuban-American, and many oppose
Castro's communist government.
"We are supportive of Miami's Cuban-American
community, which has had a negative reaction
to Francella's visit to Cuba", WDLP
spokeswoman Sonia Colin said.
Francella was in Cuba for a Latin American
film festival and met with Castro last Friday,
the Miami-based newspaper El Nuevo Herald.
The Argentine embassy in Havana released
a statement saying the meeting was "relaxed
and affable."
Colin said station officials have tried
unsuccessfully to contact Francella.
He has starred in several Argentine movies,
including "My Dad is an Idol"
and "A Day in Paradise."
Cuba Inc.'s capital investment overseas
more welcome than Das Kapital
MIAMI, 19 (AFP) - Cuba defied isolation
as the Caribbean's lone communist holdout
to build an empire of Asian restaurants,
European bars, African biotech firms and
to peddle its famous Coppelia ice creams
and even guayabera shirts abroad.
The reason: a drop-off in foreign investment
in Cuba, according to a University of Miami
study. And Cuba has found that international
capitalism spreads faster than international
communism.
Cuba's Ministry for Foreign Investment
and Economic Cooperation in 2002 sought
to "establish companies in (developing)
countries (using) Cuban high technology,
specialists and know-how with native manpower,"
the university's Institute for Cuban and
Cuban-American Studies said.
Cuba has capitalized on is best-known brands:
the Tropicana night club, La Gloria Cubana
cigars and the Bodeguita del Medio, a cramped
downtown Havana bar frequented by Ernest
Hemingway thanks to joint ventures abroad.
Cuba's tourism company, Grupo Hotelero
Grand Caribe franchised the "Bodeguita
del Medio restaurant-bar in Dubai, Paris,
Prague, Warsaw and five locations in Mexico.
Cuba's biggest tourism group, Cubanacan
earned 300 million dollars in 2002. It joined
China's Suntine International-Economic Trading
Co. to build a five-star, 700-room hotel
in Shanghai.
Cubanacan subsidiary Palmares opened a
"La Gloria Cubana" restaurant
in Shanghai as a joint venture with Shanshan.
It has a "Gloria" franchise in
Porto, Portugal, a Tocororo restaurant in
Milan and a Daiquiri Scabrous in Panama
City.
On the biotech front, Malaysia's Bioven
and Havana's CIGB created Heber Bioven to
make Cuban biotechnology products in Malaysia
for Southeast Asian markets.
Cuba built its pharmaceutical industry
on pirated international patents, but today
holds 500 patents around the world, the
university report said.
In May 2001, Cuban President Fidel Castro
himself visited construction of a biotech
research and production center outside Tehran,
a joint venture of Iran's Pasteur Institute
and Havana's Center for Genetic Engineering
and Biotechnology (CIGB).
Cuban newspapers called the center "the
largest and most modern of its type in the
Middle East," with a price tag of 60
million dollars, the university said.
As in most joint ventures, Cuba's contribution
is not cash, but technology and the know-how
of its scientists, the university noted.
Cuban doctors are famous in Africa, where
for years they provided health care. Namibia's
Zenith Enterprises joined Cuba to make basic
pharmaceuticals, from penicillin to pain
killers. The new plant will soon export
Cuban HIV/AIDS formulas to other African
countries.
Namibia and Cuba also invested in guayaberas.
The loose, four-pocket tropical shirts are
de rigeur for day and evening wear and will
be stitched with private capital, the university
said.
If the line for Coppelia ice cream gets
too long in Havana, there is an alternative:
It is produced in Ipoh, Malaysia in a joint
venture with Jawala Corp.
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