"It's alarming how charming I am!" Castro charms Americans at trade show

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THRESHING OUT A DEAL BETWEEN THE FARMERS AND FIDEL

By Mary Anastasia O'Grady
The Wall Street Journal
La Nueva Cuba
Septiembre 28, 2002

If recent opinion polls are to be believed, a slim majority of Americans have come around to the view that the U.S. embargo of Cuba should be relegated to the circular file of history.

What is less clear is how many Americans know that since 2000 Cuba has been able to buy as much food and medicine as it wants from the U.S. as long as it pays for it in cash. In other words, what the media broadly refers to as "lifting" the trade embargo is not about granting the U.S. farm lobby the right to sell its products to Cuba. It is about the right to provide credit to Fidel Castro.

The effort to allow credit to Fidel was advanced in July when the House attached an amendment to the general appropriations bill prohibiting funding to enforce any sanction on private commercial sales of agricultural commodities or medicines. The bill has two other amendments designed to withhold the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) budget for enforcing the ban on travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba and limits on monthly dollar remittances to the island. None of this changes the embargo law. It merely restricts the availability of funds to enforce certain parts of it.

Regardless of whether you are for or against the embargo, there are two huge problems with this approach. The first is that a conscious decision by the legislative body to simply end enforcement of U.S. law, rather than legitimately change it, undermines the rule of law. If Congress wishes to alter the embargo it should do so through the proper process.

Second, given Castro's inability to pay these days and the farm industry's addiction to federal subsidies and guarantees, it is logical to wonder whether U.S. agricultural interests aren't just teaming up with Fidel to stiff the U.S. taxpayer. That would explain why so many Republican politicians from farm states, who pay lip service to free markets even while funneling federal money to constituents, are so gung-ho about allowing "private" credit to one of the world's most notorious deadbeats.

For libertarians, the goal of ending embargo prohibitions is second nature. They say that U.S. citizens should be free to move about where they want and trade with whomever they like, even if it is distasteful to human rights activists. Many libertarians believe too that more engagement with Cubans would accelerate the fall of Fidel by removing his favorite excuse for the pathetic mess he has made of the country. Liberalizing remittances would mean that Cuban-Americans could legally send their imprisoned relatives the amount of money they need. The overriding effect of all of this would be less isolation of the Cuban people.

Such are the legitimate arguments against the embargo, which in no way can be construed as sympathy for the regime. The only question left is what the U.S. farm lobby, famous for its dependence on government guarantees, subsidies and protections, is suddenly doing on the side of free markets?

The farm industry's gargantuan push for the right to finance Fidel is especially strange because it comes at a time when other lenders are shutting him off. Indeed, this seems to be the reason why there is now an "opportunity" to sell to him on credit.

Earlier this month, a Reuters report said "France has frozen $175 million in short-term trade cover to Cuba after the island's government failed to pay back money owed from a similar 2000 agreement," according to a European diplomat. Cuba has also fallen into arrears with South Africa, Panama and Spain.

On March 10, Miami's El Nuevo Herald reported on an impounded Cuban ship sitting in Sheveningen Bay, outside The Hague. The Dutch had seized the ship for non-payment from the Cuban government. The story cited the Belgian newspaper Tijd which said that Cuban "cargo ships are poorly ventilated and poorly maintained, are environmentally contaminated, and leave behind them a trail of unpaid creditors at every port they visit."

The University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies has compiled a list of Cuba's bad debts. It says that Fidel owes the European Union at least $10.9 billion and hasn't paid principal or interest on its Paris Club debt since 1986. The former Soviet Union lent some $25 billion.

Cuba is in arrears to its single largest creditor, Japan, to the tune of $1.7 billion. Argentina is its next biggest creditor and is owed $1.58 billion. Cuba has debts to Chile of $20 million for unpaid fish imports, a "typical case of default on a foreign government's short-term food export credit program," according to the report. The United Kingdom's Export Credits Guarantee Program, it says, "has refused to underwrite any further British exports to Cuba due to the island's poor payment history." According to Juan O. Tamayo, in an April edition of the Miami Herald's Business Monday, Cuba "defaulted on $500 million in loans" last year.

We're supposed to believe that into this morass of defaults the U.S. agriculture industry wants to jump, taking on "private" risk and boldly going where so many have gone before and lost their shirts.

This is a little hard to swallow and even more so because the effort is being led by such heroes of government largess for farmers as Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel. Throw in the plethora of farm export credits and guarantees in the federal system and even casual observers of Washington politics would know enough to be suspicious.

Critics of the amendment are concerned about the potential for abuse of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, Export/Import Bank and various agriculture subsidy programs.

Virginia Democrat Jerry Moran who introduced the agricultural amendment says not to worry, that he has been "advised" that its language "sufficiently prohibits public entity financing." And Arizona Republican Jeff Flake, who introduced the other amendments, insists that if there is any effort to provide public financing he will fight it.

Mr. Flake might be believable if he were operating on his own in a land of limited government such as James Madison once envisioned. But he's in 2002 Washington and has teamed up with the farm lobby. He needs to do more than simply express his own pure intentions.

ABOUT THE EDITOR
Mary Anastasia O'Grady is editor of The Americas, which appears every Friday. The column discusses political, economic, business and financial events and trends in the Americas. Ms. O'Grady is also a senior editorial-page writer for the Journal, writing on Latin America and Canada. She joined the paper in 1995 and was named a senior editorial-page writer in 1999.

Prior to working at the Journal, Ms. O'Grady worked as an options strategist first for Advest Inc. in 1981 and later for Thomson McKinnon Securities in 1983. She moved to Merrill Lynch & Co. in 1984 as an options strategist.

In 1997, Ms. O'Grady won the Inter American Press Association's Daily Gleaner Award for editorial commentary, and in 1999 she received an honorable mention in IAPA's opinion award category for her editorials and weekly column. Born in Bryn Mawr, Pa., she received a bachelor's degree in English from Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. She has an M.B.A. in financial management from Pace University in New York. Ms. O'Grady invites comments to mary.o'grady@wsj.com

Here's one right-winger who's ready to trade with Fidel. Ever since that Elian Gonzales fiasco down in Miami last year, I've been a convert to giving up the embargo as a waste of time. Those crazy Miami Cubans have driven our policy toward Castro for too many years, at our collective national expense, The Bush brothers notwithstanding, it's time to get real about Cuba and move into the future. If they want to buy our farm products, lets sell and pocket some profits. It's called capitalism.

I suggest you read #22. Cuba is famous for never paying anyone for anything. There will be no profits to pocket. Americans will face the choice of paying Castro's bills or losing the American farm industry. Neither of those choices is acceptable to me.

#22- Excellent post and deserves its own thread, IMO.

Well, make sure you don't buy any of the plastic junk that comes from China....or how about the fact that the US Navy is negotiating the use of a Vietnamese harbor for refueling....well well, aren't they communist?

Another death in Castro's hands

Luis Aguilar Leon. Published Thursday, March 8, 2001, in the Miami Herald

The young woman lay in her casket. She had been 27, married and the mother of a daughter. Her first name stirred my book-fed memories. It was the famous Milady of The Three Musketeers. I had never known the woman or any of her friends or family. It was the impact of her death that brought me to the funeral. I don't know how she died or from what. But I do know the man responsible for her death: Fidel Castro.

This point must be hammered. The culpable entity in the painful Cuban odyssey is not, as Castro repeatedly chants, Yankee imperialism or the embargo. It is not the devalued Cuban people, forced to cheer in the plazas for a now-spectral revolution in whose names they starve for food and freedom. It is not Castro's enemies and ex-comrades, such as the executed general Arnaldo Ochoa and the mysteriously vanished revolutionary minister Roberto Robaina, after whom no one dares inquire.

As I stared at the late Milady, beneath the pall of her loved ones, hard questions shook my spirit. Why, Lord? Why this hemorrhage that has bled my country for 42 years? How long will Cubans die of it at home or abroad, battered by the fist of the Grand Inquisitor?

Long ago, when first rose the banners of his triumphant revolution, Castro institutionalized death and opened the canals of blood. True, blood had flowed before; under Gerardo Machado, under Fulgencio Ba- tista; but only sporadically, amid short periods of fear and political violence. Castro made it permanent. He established revolutionary tribunals and re-established the death penalty, abolished in Cuba since colonial times.

So thundered the firing squads, the revolution's somber voice, while still within its range. Free thought turned criminal, the rotting Marxist-Leninist formula became policy, and Cuba set sail toward disaster. Naturally, at the first opportunity, thousands of desperate Cubans abandoned their homeland. Once the exit windows closed, many of their countrypeople, such as Milady and Elián González's mother, braved the dangers of the sea for a chance to raise their children in freedom.

The dictator's enablers must be singled out, too.

Sadly, Castro is not the only culprit. His enablers, moved by anti-Yankeeism or economic disparity, must be singled out. They include several news organizations, notably CNN and Reuters, that often distort the facts to deflect any negativity around the Cuban dictator. Failing that, they fall back on the rosary of his revolution's baseless blessings: free schooling, free medical service, free houses. The less said about that ugly reality, the better for CNN. They include all those who, in Elián's case, ignored all rules of the game and supported Castro, deploying a relentless barrage against the Cuban exiles. Somehow, we who for years have paid U.S. taxes and obeyed its laws became a delinquent mob, a Mafia worse than the tyrant who imprisons and executes people.

Other voices railed against our disregard for either the rule of law or a father's rights, especially a father whom former Attorney General Janet Reno called a "good father,'' ignoring that Castro is the only father in Cuba. Her "rule of law'' had to be enforced at rifle point on the little boy. Perhaps now that she is retired, she will check up on Elián's communist education.

During that time, I received 11 letters assailing my lack of shame for having been Bill Clinton's professor and having such little respect for "the rule of law.'' In truth, I respect it so much, I voted it back in last November, along with many of my fellow exiles.

Copyright 2001 Miami Herald