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Sunday, June 17, 2007
In Cuba’s airport, signs point to lasting embargo
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Among the first billboards greeting visitors exiting the grounds of Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport is one that features the images of President Bush and a reviled anti-Castro militant now in Miami, Luis Posada Carriles, and avows that one plus the other equals the third image, Adolf Hitler.
Georgia’s 1st District U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston noticed it, too, when he came into town for a Cuban-American agricultural trade conference. “If I were interested in trade, I might have served up a little diplomacy with it,” said Kingston, one of five congressmen in a delegation led by Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture Tommy Irvin who attended all or part of the conference.
A week later, billboards in the airport proclaimed long life to the indestructible friendship between Cuba and Vietnam, a greeting intended for arriving Vietnamese Communist Party chief Nong Duc Manh.
Though it took Fidel Castro 40 minutes to mention Bush in a television interview that followed Manh’s visit, government officials who spoke to a group of Georgia journalists during the trade conference week wasted no such time. “We have seen a constant escalation [of efforts to force regime change] by the Bush administration against Cuba,” said Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, director of the North American Division of Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her responsibilities include the United States and Canada, but not Mexico.
Though youthful, her rhetoric is that of the old-time revolutionary — a long, detailed 100-year indictment of supposed transgressions leading to the observation that “the relationship we are facing with this administration has been one of the most difficult,” though “every American administration has attempted to change Cuba’s administration.” She continues: “We have no expectations about changes in U.S. policy in the next one and a half years… . Who knows what will happen after that?”
Ferreiro and other government officials interviewed, along with some of the American agricultural interests represented at the conference, say by making financial transactions difficult and by other subtle means, this administration obstructs even the permitted trade — food and agricultural products. Cuba, otherwise, is subject to a trade embargo and travel restrictions that keep most Americans from visiting the country.
Kirby Jones, who heads a Washington-based consulting firm, Alamar Associates, has promoted trade and trade conferences with Cuba for 33 years. “We’re in a unique situation,” he told a group of what appeared to be about 200 delegates. While agricultural trade is legal, “the executive branch is making the exercise of that trade as difficult as possible.” In a conversation later, he elaborated, citing financing and banking restrictions — requiring cash in advance and no direct banking — and a once-a-year limitation on visits to Cuba by American port officials.
“People in the executive branch are doing what they can to stop it [trade with Cuba], to prevent it, to screw it up,” he said.
He and the Cubans expect nothing to change until Bush leaves office. Besides, the embargo and travel restrictions aren’t on the radar. “Cuba is nobody’s No. 1 issue,” said Jones. “Iraq is sucking the political life out of every other issue.”
Kingston, who has voted repeatedly in Congress to maintain the embargo, says after some equivocation that “I really do sense that this thing is coming to a …” He doesn’t finish the sentence and tries another tact. “It may not be a point — it may be a blunt angle.” He notes, as the farm representatives do, that we trade with former enemies Vietnam and China. “We need to get over this thing somehow.”
But two passages will occur first. A determined administration. And Castro.
If nothing more than a question of trade, lifting the embargo would be a no-brainer, says Kingston. After that, there’s the question of compensation to American businesses — and to Cuban Americans — for properties seized. And those questions are eons from resolution.
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