Free Republic

ON THE heels of President George Bush's call to shift away from United States reliance on Middle East oil, a contingent of Texas oilmen and bureaucrats from Havana gathered in Mexico to discuss a nervy alternative: Cuba. Despite Washington's 45-year trade embargo against Fidel Castro's Government, Cuban officials are courting US energy companies to produce oil in its territorial waters. Late on Friday, an agency of the US Treasury Department, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, asked Starwood Hotels, the company that owns the Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City where the three-day meeting was being held, to require the...

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- In the two years since oil reservoirs were discovered off Cuba's coast, Canadian, Chinese, Indian and Norwegian companies have lined up to explore the potentially lucrative Caribbean waters. U.S. corporations have watched the activity less than 60 miles south of Florida's coastline with their hands tied. U.S. oil exploration in Cuban waters -- along with most U.S. trade -- is prohibited under a 45-year-old U.S. embargo designed to undermine Fidel Castro's communist government. "Right on our own border, there is going to be substantial activity in what is probably the last unexplored deposits in the world,"...