By Steven Oberbeck. The Salt Lake Tribune. Thursday, March 9, 2000
Two Utah companies recently back from a trade mission to Cuba may want to sell their products on the island despite the U.S. trade embargo.
They can circumvent the embargo because an exception allows the sale of health care-related products.
But getting orders from the cash-starved country may be a problem.
Representatives of Nature's Sunshine Products of Provo, which sells vitamins and herbal products, and South Jordan's Ultradent Products, a marketer of dental items, went to Cuba for the U.S. Healthcare Exhibition in late January.
They were accompanied to Havana by Dan Mabey, director of the Utah International Business Development Office, and Patrick Didier, the office's director of the Americas.
The trade show represented the first time in more than 40 years that U.S. health-care companies exhibited their products in Cuba, Didier said. Some of the country's largest providers of health-care products, including Eli Lilly and Baxter International Health Care, were exhibitors.
Utah was the only government organization from the United States with representatives at the show. U.S. Department of Commerce officials were scheduled to attend, but Cuba did not approve their visas at the last moment because of the Elian Gonzalez affair, Didier said. A dispute persists
over whether the boy rescued at sea after his mother drowned should be returned to his father's custody in Cuba
Nature's Sunshine and Ultradent are studying ways to sell their products in Cuba.
"Cuba is about the only Latin American country where we do not have distributors," said Dennis Tenney, director of international new market development at Nature's Sunshine. "The Cuban people appeared eager to get our products."
Obstacles exist, however.
Nature's Sunshine sells its products through a multilevel marketing network. It cannot use that type of sales approach in Cuba. All health-care product purchases in Cuba are handled through the Ministry of Public Health.
"We will have to find another way of doing business there and I am not sure we want to do that," Tenney said.
Dirk Jeffs, director of international sales at Ultradent, said dentists attending the show showed interest in Ultradent's products.
"And that was the sad part," he said. "Everyone talked about our products and said how much they wanted to use them, but they were not the people making the buying decisions."
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