CUBA-US: Agreement on Elian Case Feeds Hopes for Easing Embargo

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Apr 27 2000 (IPS) - The agreement between Washington and Havana that Cuban shipwreck boy Elián González belongs with his father has fed the hopes of a growing US movement in favour of loosening or lifting the nearly four-decades-old economic embargo against Cuba.

“This is a good time for the US Congress to lift the embargo on sales of medicine and food,” Democratic Representative Charles Stenholm for the state of Texas said Wednesday in Havana.

The lawmaker headed a three-day visit to Cuba this week by a delegation comprised of 19 members of the Texas Farm Bureau, which represents more than 300,000 farmers and ranchers.

“The atmosphere in both of our countries is very good now for conducting these discussions,” said Stenholm, who clarified however that the trip was planned several weeks before six-year- old Elián was reunited with his father Juan Miguel González on Saturday.

In late November, Elián survived the capsizing of the boat in which he, his mother Elizabeth Brotons, and 12 other undocumented Cuban emigrés were attempting to reach the United States. The boy’s mother drowned, and both the US and Cuban governments were drawn into the ensuing custody battle.

The anti-Castro Cuban exile community in Miami demanded that Elián’s relatives in that city be granted custody over the boy, arguing that it was not his best interests to grow up in socialist Cuba.

But the US government enforced the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) decision that the boy was to be handed over to his father, who flew from Cuba to the United States to take his son home.

Donald Patman, president of the Texas Farm Bureau, told a news briefing that “we feel the embargo has failed in spectacular fashion.”

“Texas farmers and ranchers could easily and profitably supply many of the products both used and needed here in Cuba,” he stressed, while adding that farmers and ranchers in Texas believed it was better to use food in favour of peace and cooperation between the two nations.

“Over 90 percent of our (US) farmers and ranchers say that it is time to lift all unilaterally imposed sanctions on food and medicine,” said Stenholm.

“It is in the interests of American farmers and the consumers of the world, including Cuba, that we do not use food for any other purpose other than feeding people, and the same goes for medicine,” he maintained.

The US delegation met with Cuban foreign ministry, agriculture and national bank officials.

Stenholm, the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, stressed his support for an amendment that would exonerate sales of medicine and foodstuffs from the embargo. The bill was approved last month by the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and is set for a vote in the Senate.

Similar initiatives were blocked twice before by sectors of Congress opposed to lifting the embargo, and today food and medicine can only be sold to non-governmental organisations in Cuba.

Stenholm pointed out that since this is an election year, it is hard to predict whether the bill will pass. But he said he was hoping that the unilateral sanctions would be removed.

Stenholm and Patman said such a decision would be “a logical step” towards lifting the embargo.

One of the chief aims of the blockade was to push Cuba towards a peaceful transition to democracy. But growing sectors in the United States believe the embargo has failed, and has even been counterproductive, in that aim.

Patman stressed the need for new markets for US foodstuffs, estimating that US food sales to Cuba could amount to one billion dollars annually.

Embargos hurt US farmers and are not good policy, argued Stenholm.

Although one of the biggest problems suffered by the Cuban economy is a shortage of foreign currency to pay for imports, the US delegation said that question should be discussed farther down the road.

The delegates stressed that they were farmers, not exporters, and that the first thing was to get the unilateral sanctions lifted.

Visits by US delegations to Cuba have been increasing since early last year, when the Bill Clinton administration eased restrictions on Cuba to foment more direct contact between the two countries.

According to US diplomats, 20,000 US nationals were authorised to visit Cuba in last November and December alone.

Last month, representatives of large US sugar mills, headed by Wayne Smith, a former head of the US Interests Section in Havana, met with Cuba’s sugar and foreign ministers, and visited sugar refineries on the island.

In late January, 97 US firms, including giants like Procter and Gamble, Pfizer and Medtronic, participated in the US Healthcare Exhibition held in the Cuban capital.

And business leaders from the two countries are currently preparing for the fifth Cuban-US business meeting, to be held in June in the southeastern Mexican city of Cancun.

Preparatory meetings, in which more than 150 US firms and several government ministers from Cuba have taken part, have discussed investment possibilities in the Caribbean island nation.

US analysts say these “small openings” are putting pressure on the US government to continue to adopt measures aimed at moving towards a bilateral agenda.

Nevertheless, all of the presidential candidates running in the US November elections say they are in favour of maintaining the embargo against Cuba.