Posted on 04/24/2003 1:54:51 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
HAVANA (Reuters) - U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin traveled to Cuba to promote sales of Iowa farm products, but ended his visit on Thursday calling on President Fidel Castro to release jailed dissidents.
The Iowa Democrat, an outspoken defender of human rights in other parts of the world, had planned his sales pitch trip to Cuba before the island's communist authorities arrested 75 pro-democratic opponents of Castro last month and handed them stiff sentences of up to 28 years in prison.
"The Cuban government should grant the appeals of all 75 prisoners of conscience and release them forthwith," Harkin said at a news conference. He said the harsh sentences were tantamount to life sentences for some of the older dissidents.
Harkin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, met with Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque and the president of the Cuban National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, but not with Castro.
He also met with leading dissidents Elizardo Sanchez and Vladimiro Roca, who asked him to raise his voice to get their fellow dissidents out of prison.
The worst wave of political repression in decades in Cuba has brought to a standstill efforts in Washington by farm and business groups to further ease U.S. trade sanctions and end a ban on American tourism to the Caribbean island.
On Tuesday, the entire board of directors of the Cuba Policy Foundation, a Washington lobby group that had pushed to lift the embargo, resigned in protest over the arrests and executions of three men who hijacked a Havana commuter ferry in a bid to reach the United States.
"Some said I should not come here under these circumstances, but a policy of isolation and the embargo of 42 years has not achieved any U.S. objectives nor made life better for the average Cuban citizen," Harkin said.
The senator also asked the Bush administration to make it clear that it has no plans for military action against Cuba, responding to Cuban fears that Washington might be aiming at a regime change in Cuba after Iraq.
The Cuban government rounded up the dissidents last month and put them on trial for conspiring with the United States to subvert the one-party communist society born from Castro's 1959 guerrilla revolution.
The arrests included independent journalists and many of the organizers of a signature campaign called the Varela Project that united the island's small and divided oppositions groups last year behind a petition for peaceful democratic reforms.
After meeting with dissidents, including the Gisela Delgado, whose husband Hector Palacios was handed a 25-year jail term, Harkin said "it is clear that the best course of action now is moderation not escalation, engagement not isolation."
At that meeting on Tuesday evening at the Hotel Nacional, the dissidents recognized the waiter serving drinks as one of the witnesses the government produced at Palacios' trial to testify that the dissident had met with U.S. legislators at the hotel.
Nader Says U.S. Should Trade with Cuba Like China *** HAVANA (Reuters) - U.S. consumer advocate Ralph Nader said on Sunday that the United States ought to lift economic sanctions against Cuba and trade with the communist-run island like it does with China. "The trade between the United States and Cuba should be the same as it is between the United States and China," the Green Party 2000 presidential candidate told reporters. Nader arrived in Havana for a three-day visit. ***
North Dakota Lands Cuban Grain Deals - Who Will Benefit?*** HAVANA (AP) - Members of a North Dakota delegation hoping to sell more of their state's grain to communist Cuba said Tuesday they were already working on new sales contracts during the first full day of their trade mission. "We are looking to get some free time today so we can call and check on some prices," North Dakota Farm Bureau President Eric Aasmundstad said as the group toured a wheat milling plant. "That's how far along we are," he said, declining to provide specifics until contracts were signed.
"Our discussions have gone very well and we are hopeful that we will be leaving here with some good contracts," added Gov. John Hoeven, who with Aasmundstad is heading the four-mission that began Monday. Delegation members said they were not pushing for a meeting with President Fidel Castro and are instead focusing on doing as much business as possible before they return home on Thursday. The visit by Hoeven comes as American farm representatives press Congress to expand a 2-year-old law allowing direct sales of food to the island, an exception to sanctions prohibiting most trade with the island.
Among measures now being considered by U.S. lawmakers is one that would allow financing for American food sales to Cuba - now conducted on a cash basis. Pedro Alvarez, president of the Cuban food import concern Alimport, said Monday his county could buy as much as 60 to 70 percent of all imported food from the United States if financing were allowed. ***
Ventura Leads Food Industry to Cuba - U.S. taxpayers queuing up for "big giant goose egg"*** Cuba is looking to buy mainly bulk food, which the state sells to the population at greatly subsidized prices, and also products for its tourist industry and dollar-only shops. Havana is also banking on the end of a U.S. prohibition on credit that has forced it to pay cash up front for the imports needed to feed Cuba's 11 million people.
Cuba has not recovered since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago, and has exhausted most of its credit with suppliers in European and other nations. European diplomats in Havana complain that Cuba is paying cash for its U.S. imports while it owes their countries tens of millions of dollars in past purchases.
"Cuba is an international deadbeat," Cason, the U.S. interests office chief, told reporters. He warned U.S. companies that Cuba had defaulted on most of its loans, had the lowest possible credit rating and owed its international partners $11 billion. "We don't want to be in that queue of people asking to get their money," he said in a statement read out to reporters. "It's great to sell eggs for cash, but let's not stick the U.S. tax payers with a big, giant goose-egg," Cason said.***
"It's alarming how charming I am!" Castro charms Americans at trade show***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.
Are they being used?
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.
Playing to the crowd
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.***
Here's a thread with a lot of interesting comments.
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