Castro commands: clone our supercow

In recent years, milk has become a luxury item in Cuba. Since Soviet subsidies dried up in the 1990s, good quality animal feed has all but disappeared, leading to a disastrous decline in milk yields. Fidel Castro's government hopes to solve the problem by "resurrecting" a bovine hero of the revolution 17 years after its death.

The daily milk yield of a cow called Ubre Blanca (White Udder), a cross between the Cuban zebu breed and a Canadian Holstein bull, astonished and delighted Communist Party officials in the early 1980s.

In 1982 it produced 110 litres (24 gallons) of milk in a single day - four times the average - and instantly became a legend throughout Cuba. It went on to set a world record by producing 24,268.9 litres of milk (5,338.5 gallons) in one 305-day lactation period.

In the same way that the Soviet Union mythologised Alexei Stakhanov, the miner who was reputed to have overfilled his quota by 1,400 per cent when he hewed 102 tons of coal in a day, Ubre Blanca received front page treatment in Granma, the Cuban equivalent of Pravda.

The newspaper gave daily updates on the cow's prodigious output, which was presented as a triumph of communist breeding skills. It even made it into the Guinness Book of Records.

President Castro visited its farm, appearing on television as he gently stroked the hide of the finest member of the country's workforce. No bovine in the United States, it was pointed out, could come close to matching White Udder's output.

When the cow died in 1985, President Castro commissioned a marble statue which still stands in the rural town of Nuevo Gerona, where White Udder once grazed. Taxidermists stuffed her for the admiration of posterity. Moving obituaries appeared in Granma.

"She gave her all for the people," said Pastor Ponce, an agronomist at the National Cattle Health Centre.

Then, in Cuba's universities, scientists began to devote all their energies towards achieving "Il Commandante's" dearest wish: a second White Udder. Tissue from the cow was taken and frozen. Its eggs had also been harvested while it was still alive.

As scientists have struggled ever since to develop rudimentary techniques for cloning it, President Castro has delivered regular heartfelt exhortations to the Havana Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology.

On one occasion, he told scientists: "If we discover a technique, if another White Udder is found, or a prodigious descendant of White Udder, what can prevent us from immediately applying this practice everywhere across the country, to all the cows of Cuba?"

Now, Dr Jose Morales, the head of the White Udder cloning project, is confident that a breakthrough is imminent. "We're very close," he said. "We have big things coming. This project is very important to Commandante Castro."

Last month Fidel Oviedo, the centre's director for animal biotechnology, gave the visiting former American president Jimmy Carter a slide-show demonstrating the progress made.

"We hope Steven Spielberg was prophetic when he made dinosaurs come back in Jurassic Park," said Mr Oviedo, whose organisation enjoys a generous share of the total state funding to research institutes.

Other Cubans are more sceptical about their leader's big idea, although they are acutely aware of the country's embarrassing shortage of milk. On the Cuban black market, three pounds of powdered milk costs £2.10, a quarter of the average monthly wage.

When Florida and Cuba staged a tug-of-war over Elian Gonzalez, the small Cuban boy who was washed up on the Miami coastline with other refugees in 1999, his Miami relatives boasted of their ability to provide him with a steady supply of milk.

Andres Molina Valdes, a researcher with the Cuban Institute of Animal Science, says that it will take more than a second White Udder to solve the problems that have plagued the dairy industry since the revolution, when most land and livestock was swiftly taken into state ownership.

"So we clone White Udder. And then what?" said Mr Valdes. "Cuba's problem is not a single cow, it's the tens of thousands of animals which produce food for the country.

"Cows are producing much less than they should do and they're also dying much earlier than they should do. The way in which we're going about this, we're never going to improve things."

Exasperated by the Cuban government's sentimental attachment to the long-dead White Udder, Mr Molina has asked for asylum in America, where he hopes that scientific research will not be as "politicised" as in Cuba.

Iria Gonzalez-Rodiles Ruiz, a Cuban writer and journalist, has also tired of all the nostalgia. "All the genetic experiments have led to nothing," she wrote recently. "Where's the milk?"

I, for one, hope they succeed......not in cloning......but in identifying the gene(s) which led to such prodigious output.

If such a gene could be implanted in the embryos of 5% the cows in the world, we'd all be better off.

Certainly we wouldn't want to implant in all embryos until we observed the impact over 4-5 generations.

The first good idea Fidel has ever had.

Was the output of the cow real? Before I got to the point where the article mentioned Stakhanov, I was thinking of him. Long ago exposed as a phony, a propaganda artefact.

Research institutes do what's "very important to Commandante Castro." Well, bully. He's not only the world's greatest humanitarian, visionary, military genius (a claim made by another uniformed twit with facial hair, once), and general panjandrum, he's also the world authority on agriculture and scientific animal husbandry. Just ask Granma.

Who was the bozo mishandling agriculture before Castro came along today to micromanage it? Couldn't have been the Americas' answer to African cannibal leader Idi Amin, one Fidel Castro. Could it?

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F

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