|
The Miami
Herald.
Economic links aim of Cuba visits
By Jennifer Babson. Jbabson@herald.com. Posted on Sun, Aug.
11, 2002 in The Miami Herald.
It was the kind of stealth visit no politician in Miami would be caught dead
making.
Two weeks ago, Tampa Mayor Dick Greco -- accompanied by more than a dozen
business and civic leaders -- stepped onto a private jet that touched down one
hour later at Havana's José Martí Airport.
His four-day visit, which included a one-on-one meeting with Cuban President
Fidel Castro, is the latest in an increasing number of trips to the island by
politicians from Florida and elsewhere. Their quest: economic gain for the
people they represent.
In going, they skirt the thorny issues of national and exile politics in
order to explore potentially lucrative business ties with Cuba that are
permitted under the four-decades-old U.S. trade embargo.
''If the cities of Florida don't do this, then ultimately they will be left
behind,'' said Eric Smith, a former Jacksonville city councilman who visited
Cuba seven years ago with a port authority delegation.
"New Orleans has been there, as well as the ports in Georgia and
Mississippi. Now even [Minnesota Gov.] Jesse Ventura is going.''
Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation, an
influential anti-Castro lobby, is seeing the same trend, much to his chagrin.
''Everybody's curious about the market, and everybody doesn't want to be
left out,'' he said.
Greco, whose unpublicized trip ignited a political flap after he returned
home, had a nearly six-hour meeting with Castro over shrimp cocktails, chicken
with yellow rice and chocolate-and-vanilla ice cream. Greco said the two didn't
talk politics or embargo. Rather, they discussed agriculture, healthcare,
transportation and Havana's fleet of garbage trucks.
As the Tampa Democrat was leaving, he received a crisp salute from the Cuban
leader -- perhaps in recognition that Greco was the first mayor from a big city
in Florida with a sizable Cuban population to visit the island in four decades.
About 35,000 Cuban Americans live in the Tampa area.
'SYMBOLISM'
''It was the symbolism -- the mayor of the second-largest city in the state
of Florida,'' said Albert A. Fox Jr., a Washington, D.C., businessman and Tampa
native who used his contacts in Cuba's government to set up Greco's meeting with
Castro.
Fox, founder of the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation, an
anti-embargo group, accompanied Greco, who did not respond to calls seeking
comment. The alliance paid for Greco's trip.
Ralph Fernandez, a Tampa attorney and well-known anti-Castro critic, agreed
with Fox's assessment, though he condemned the visit.
''It's a massive coup,'' Fernandez said. "This is going to have a
ripple effect.''
Both men say such visits are part of a Cuban ''charm offensive'' under way
in Florida, as it has been in the rest of the country for a while. The thrust:
Undercut the Cuban exile opposition to lifting the embargo by focusing on
commerce.
''The goal was to get somebody with credibility from Tampa to go because of
the cover it gives everybody else,'' Fox said. "[The Cubans] have now
almost written Miami off.
''It shows their irrelevance,'' he added.
''The campaign is working because there is an erosion in principle,''
Fernandez said. "It brings us to this sad day in American history because
we are willing to trade with anyone for financial gain.''
Other elected officials from across the country -- including two governors,
former President Jimmy Carter and at least two dozen members of Congress -- have
also popped up across the Florida Straits in recent months.
Ventura, Minnesota governor, has said he plans to add his name to that
roster later this year.
But until Greco went, no Florida politician of such stature had dared make
an appearance, though others have shown interest in Cuba as some of their
constituents jockey for future position in the island's marketplace.
Last year, U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said he was considering a trip to
the island to meet mostly with dissidents. But Nelson, who opposes lifting the
embargo and met with exile leaders to discuss his travel plans, subsequently
said he didn't think Cuba would grant him a visa.
Greco's trip followed an April visit to the island by Manatee County
Commissioner Joe McClash. Several businessmen joined McClash, who toted donated
medicine and met with Cuban port officials.
Earlier this summer, a delegation of Monroe County officials had planned a
fact-finding mission, but the trip was scotched.
''President [Bush] showed up in Miami and made a speech about how he wasn't
going to do anything to normalize relations with Cuba, and I think everybody
just backed off from going,'' Key West Mayor Jimmy Weekley said.
But Weekley says he still believes Keys officials need to begin to lay the
groundwork for future business relations with Cuba now.
''I think we need to go over there and see what's there,'' he said. "Our
port director should go down and start having some conversations.''
Because of its geographic proximity, Cuba's economic future is of particular
interest to port officials across Florida.
Prior to 1959, when Castro took power, about 80 percent of Cuba's U.S.
exports went through Jacksonville, said Smith, the city councilman who made the
1995 visit.
''I think it's important to go to Cuba, consistent with the requirements of
the federal government of course,'' he said.
That last part caused some trouble for Smith's delegation. The port
authority later paid a $20,000 fine after federal regulators concluded they
violated the trade embargo by not obtaining U.S. Treasury permission before
spending $4,500 on the trip. A recent natural disaster helped open some doors
and fuel the scramble to get a piece of the Cuban market. In the aftermath of
Hurricane Michelle, which devastated parts of the island in November, the Cuban
government began to purchase some American commodities -- a decision made
possible by a 2000 law permitting direct U.S. food and agricultural sales.
Though the direct commercial buys, the first from the United States in 40 years,
were expected to last only a short time, Cuba has continued to purchase U.S.
goods.
By the end of this year, Cuba is expected to have bought $165 million in
American food and agricultural products, according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and
Economic Council, a nonpartisan New York-based group that tracks the island's
economy.
Cuban officials have projected they will purchase another $95 million in
U.S. exports in 2003.
INTEREST INCREASES
As a result, John S. Kavulich, the trade council's president, says he has
fielded a dramatic increase in the number of Cuba inquiries from South Florida
firms in recent months.
''The vast majority of the Florida-based companies that have increased their
interest toward Cuba during the last eight months are owned by people of Cuban
descent,'' Kavulich said. "And the majority of those companies are
headquartered in Dade and Broward counties.''
During the initial phase of the deal-making, Cuba avoided doing business
with exiles from South Florida, but has since softened its stance. For example,
Kavulich said, Havana recently purchased $500,000 worth of goods from a
Miami-based firm whose name he would not reveal.
''The Cuban government has now disconnected Florida [exile] politics from
Florida commerce,'' Kavulich said.
In July, Florida Produce of Hillsborough County Inc., a company owned by an
American of Cuban descent, became the first state-based company in four decades
to directly export agricultural goods to the island when it sold $25,000 worth
of onions to Cuba.
Anti-Castro critics say such deals are immoral, given the Communist
government's record of abuses. They also point out that Cuba is cash-strapped
and cannot, under U.S. law, obtain financing from U.S. companies or institutions
for such purchases.
CANF's Garcia says the endgame in Cuba is to tout economic plums to leverage
business leaders, interest groups and others who are playing a key role in the
push to one day lift the embargo.
Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban
and Cuban-American Studies, agrees.
''I think [these groups] are trying to get ahead of the game,'' he said. "But
there is a complete disregard among these people for the human rights and the
suffering of the Cuban people.''
Cuban farmer's son wins World Food Prize
Posted on Mon, Aug. 12, 2002.
DES MOINES - (AP) -- A Cuban farmer's son whose hopes of improving the
family farm were dashed during Fidel Castro's rise to power has won the 2002
World Food Prize for developing methods to feed millions of starving people.
Pedro Sanchez, 62, was named on Sunday as winner of the $250,000 prize for
transforming depleted tropical soils into productive agricultural lands.
''This prize recognizes the importance of work in tropical soils, the
special value of eliminating hunger in Africa,'' Sanchez said. "It can be
done. The world needs to do it. If we put the resources behind it, it will
happen.''
The 2002 award was announced at the International Horticultural Congress in
Toronto, Canada, by Kenneth M. Quinn, president of the Des Moines-based World
Food Prize Foundation.
Sanchez said he once hoped to return to the family farm.
''My dad had a farm in Cuba and a fertilizer business,'' Sanchez said.
''Since I was a little kid, I've been involved in soil and plants. No question,
when it was time for college, it was time to go to college in the states. I was
going to be a soil scientist.'' That was in 1958.
"I was going back to Cuba to work on my father's farm. Then, everything
got confiscated.''
Sanchez stayed on at Cornell University, earning his master's degree and
then his Ph.D.
'The Cornell people were concerned about the soil crisis. I said 'OK.' I
went to work on that to see if I could make a contribution,'' Sanchez said.
As a graduate student in the Philippines, Sanchez saw the development of
''miracle rice,'' a genetic line of rice that has more than doubled the world's
rice production over the last 30 years.
Afterward, Sanchez was named to lead North Carolina State University's rice
research team in Peru. The program spread to Brazil.
Sanchez decided what had been done with rice varieties "can be done
also with soils, better management of soils.''
By calculating the precise depths and intervals at which to treat the soil
with minerals and fertilizers, 75 million acres in those countries were made
more productive. Average yields increased by 60 percent and soybean production
became on par with the United States.
''The challenge now is in Africa,'' Sanchez said.
At the International Center for Research in Agroforestry in Nairobi, Kenya,
Sanchez has led research to replenish the exhausted soil.
With poverty widespread, expensive fertilizers were out of the question. The
answer was to plant trees that take nitrogen from the air and put it back in the
soil through their roots.
So far, the method is being used on 150,000 small farms.
''Those 150,000 farmers, factored by seven for family members, they're no
longer hungry,'' he said. The method now must be scaled to 150 million farmers
to end hunger in Africa. ''Science has the tools now to do it and it can be
done,'' he said.
Sanchez, recently appointed chairman of the U.N. Taskforce on World Hunger,
will receive the World Food Prize Oct. 24 at a symposium in Iowa.
The prize has been awarded annually since 1987.
Coast Guard repatriates four Cuban migrants
By The Associated Press. Posted on Fri, Aug. 09, 2002.
MIAMI - The U.S. Coast Guard repatriated four Cuban migrants Friday after
picking them up in a rowboat 50 miles southeast of Key West.
Their 10-foot rowboat was intercepted by a Coast Guard cutter Wednesday. The
men were transferred to another cutter and interviewed by Immigration and
Naturalization Service agents, who decided to return them to Cuba. The men were
taken to Bahia de Cabanas, Cuba, on Friday.
The Coast Guard picked up six Cuban migrants on a raft Wednesday in a
separate incident. They were repatriated the same day.
Cubans who set foot on U.S. soil are often given permanent residence but
those intercepted at sea can be repatriated if they can't prove a claim for
asylum. | 
