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

Havana, Cuba - Quite apart from any deals struck here, the landmark U.S.-Cuba trade show that ends Monday has been a public relations windfall for Fidel Castro, who has played the solicitous host with charm and mastery.

The old man of history has left some of his American guests aglow. Others are shaking their heads at his pure political skill.

At the fair's official dinner Saturday night, Castro delivered a 20-minute speech, thanking the Americans here for their "initiative and courage" and praising the "great values and human virtues we have always recognized in the American people."

Given the Bush administration's avid commitment to the 43-year-old trade embargo, and Cuba's deep desire to see it end, the presence of more than 700 U.S. farmers, businesspeople and journalists has provided Castro with a unique opportunity to advance his agenda.

He has made the most of it, working the hall, hosting intimate receptions and large extravaganzas, making cross-cultural gestures of solidarity between communist Cuba and the American heartland.

At a gala performance of Cuban entertainers, a choir sang "Camptown Races" and a Christian hymn. Little Cuban and U.S. flags are paired everywhere. Interpreter at his side, Castro has held a series of private state-by-state gatherings, lingering, joking, playfully debating with his astonished guests, plunging into the minutiae of crop production, livestock herds and child nutrition.

Eleven Iowans dined at the presidential palace Friday, where "El Comandante" greeted them at the door and saw them out long after midnight. They had their pictures taken individually with Castro. The women went home with roses, the men with Cohiba cigars.

"It's really hard for me to say this as a child of the '50s and '60s, but the man was funny!" said Iowa Agriculture Secretary Patty Judge. "Just one-liner after one-liner."

Measuring out portions of buffalo milk for the group to sample, Castro worried he wouldn't have enough. He turned the occasion into a mock political science discourse.

"When we make the portions small but everybody's getting the same milk and there's milk left over, that's socialism," Castro said, laughing "hysterically," according to Judge. "If we pour out all the milk and share equally, that's communism."

He digressed at length about the Cuban revolution, telling Judge that "if he was that ruthless he would not have won, because the people's support was with him."

Meeting with Kentuckians on Thursday, he cited America's Revolutionary War-era slogan of "No taxation without representation."

Sounding like a Republican knocking big government, he suggested that America's new slogan should be "no taxation."

His guests have learned that he eats little, asks lots of questions and talks about a great many things.

Castro lavished special attention on one young, articulate and affable Minnesota farm family caring for the five pairs of U.S.-bred bison, sheep, pigs, beef cattle and dairy cattle here. Breeder Ralph Kaehler, his wife, Mena, and his sons Cliff, 13, and Seth, 11, talked livestock with Castro in the exhibition hall.

The Cuban leader then made them his special guests at the Thursday night gala at the Karl Marx theater; he sat with the blond-haired boys at his side while Cuba's finest dancers, singers and musicians performed to rousing ovations.

When Castro entered the theater, Americans joined Cubans in standing and warmly applauding the 76-year-old autocrat - a sight that left a striking impression on many in the audience.

"Who would have thought 400 or 500 Americans would stand up and clap for Fidel Castro? That doesn't happen every day," said Kirby Jones, a veteran consultant on business in Cuba.

Some interpreted it as a natural and polite response to a hosting head of state; others detected more enthusiasm in the applause than they would have expected.

In his speech Saturday, Castro cast U.S. policy as placing as much of a burden on America as on Cuba, calling for an end to the embargo so "the hard-working American farmer will never again have to worry about finding markets" for his output.

If the trade show has been a PR coup for Castro, perhaps the biggest reason is that he has allowed the Americans themselves - suited corporate types, "regular" farm and business folk from the Deep South and upper Midwest - to make his case for him.

"If you believe as (President Bush) has said, he's for free trade, why not trade with our neighbors to the south?" Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tommy Irvin, a Democrat, said after celebrating a contract to ship rice to Cuba.

Here was Irvin, like many other Americans on the trip, embracing Cuba while criticizing the Bush administration's foreign policy.

Does this make these Americans servants of Castro's propaganda or objects of his manipulation, as Bush officials and anti-Castro Cuban-Americans suggested in advance of the trade show?

Some Americans here, such as Ralph Kaehler, are quite openly impressed by Castro, saying they find him genuine, funny and inquisitive.

"I hear all that stuff about how oppressed the people are. I don't see that," Irvin said in an interview. (At a recent anti-embargo conference in Washington, a Human Rights Watch official said the Cuban regime is guilty of "systematic and massive human rights violations.")

Some approvingly recite Castro's boasts about Cuba's record on health and education. Some can only be described as star-struck by his personality and historical celebrity.

Others, though, offer no defense of the Cuban government and begin with the premise that Castro is extracting as much political value out of them as he possibly can.

Wisconsin businessman Tim Riemenschneider found it odd seeing Castro treated like an icon as he worked the exhibition hall Thursday.

"I'm a (former) military guy sitting there, saying, 'What's wrong with this picture?' " said Riemenschneider, international director for Chiquita Processed Foods, a private-label vegetable packer headquartered in New Richmond.

He assumes Castro, in embracing his U.S. guests, wants to "jam this down President Bush's throat." And he expects the trade show will help accomplish Castro's agenda, sending hundreds of businesspeople back to America with sharpened interest, producing more political pressure to ease the embargo further.

But even those who regard themselves as realists about the Cuban regime dispute the notion that they're simply being "played."

Their argument: The food sales are legal; they are being paid; and trade benefits both sides, the U.S. and Cuba.

"I think we're all grown-ups," Judge said. "Most of us have been around the block a time or two and we can sort things out. The Cubans are definitely putting their best foot forward and rolling out every red carpet they've got."

But, Judge said, "I can sell them the products without ascribing to his form of government."

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

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

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