Entrepreneurs to tour culinary schools
By Carol Rosenberg . crosenberg@herald.com. Published Friday, September 1, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Claiming a first-ever expedition from Cuba's emerging entrepreneurial class, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring a fact-finding trip to the United States next month for about 25 private farmers and restaurant owners.
Never before has Cuba allowed private sector business people to go on organized trips abroad, chamber vice president Craig Johnstone said in an interview Thursday. A former State Department official who focused on Latin America, Johnstone now works for the Washington, D.C., business group, which
has long advocated trade ties with Havana.
"This is not a public relations ploy,'' said Johnstone, who negotiated with the Cuban government to permit the private-sector mission. "We hope they will get some value out of it, going back to Cuba after seeing how a private sector program can work.''
Restaurateurs, including owners of paladares, home operated mom-and-pop restaurants, will visit several culinary schools. The chamber won't say whether the 10-day visit will include the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, known as the CIA, in Hyde Park, N.Y.
Farmers who managed to retain ownership of small tracts of land throughout the communist era will visit agriculture programs under an exchange to expose Cuban free marketeers to the mother of all free markets, the USA.
But the 10-day private sector mission, scheduled for October, will not come to South Florida, Johnstone said. He did not rule out future Cuban-exile exchanges because "there is a very strong interest in the Cuban-American community in Miami in doing everything possible to help out the
private sector in Cuba.
"There is no element of controversy'' in skipping Miami in October, he said. "This is simply a question of time. The only people who oppose dialogue and contact are people who have a vested interest in the status quo.''
A State Department spokesman said diplomats would review the restaurateurs' and farmers' visa applications on an individual basis, once they were presented in Havana.
Johnstone, meanwhile, declined to name any of the educational institutions that have agreed to host the Cubans, saying he had not yet obtained clearance to identify them. They will include agriculture schools, universities, cooking schools and hotel management programs.
OWNERS, MANAGERS
Not every restaurant owner on the trip will be an owner of a paladar, the private restaurants that Cubans run out of their homes with some government supervision, Johnstone said. Others attending will include managers of government-owned restaurants who have been told they have to break even or
earn a profit.
Johnstone, meantime, declined to confirm whether he had been a broker on a proposed meeting this week between Miami business people and Cuban parliamentary speaker Ricardo Alarcón, who is expected in New York next week for the United Nations General Assembly meeting.
Among those approached for a meeting with Alarcón were Carlos Saladrigas Sr., chief executive of ADP TotalSource, and Carlos de la Cruz of Eagle Brands, executives who took part in ill-fated, 11th hour mediation to resolve the Elián González crisis in September.
Both Saladrigas and de la Cruz said Thursday that they rebuffed chamber overtures to meet with Alarcón.
"I just don't think it would be appropriate under present circumstances,'' Saladrigas said. Pressed, he added that he would not rule out a possible chamber meeting with private Cuban business people.
The State Department earlier this week revealed that it had denied a request by Alarcón to come in advance of the U.N. meeting, to attend a New York session of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a Hague based organization that is not part of the United Nations.
In such instances, the State Department has discretion on whether to issue a visa. Permission to enter for the General Assembly, however, is not discretionary under the conditions by which the United States houses the United Nations.
TALKS TO RESUME
Also Thursday, the State Department announced that Cuba has agreed to end a two-month suspension and resume migration talks with the U.S. that stem from agreements signed in 1994 and 1995.
Cuba suspended the semiannual talks in June in the heat of the tug-of-war over 6-year-old Elián González. Washington complained this week that Havana was violating the migration accords by denying exit permits to some Cubans who had been granted U.S. visas.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Havana indicated its willingness to resume the periodic talks in a 15-page note delivered late Wednesday. He said the note contained "some tired old rhetoric,'' in which Cuba portrayed itself as a victim of U.S. policy.
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