May 19, 2000

Return to Cuba
Board finds end of unilateral sanctions is long overdue

By Gene Hall
Publisher

Texas farmers and ranchers are seldom in more agreement than in their position on unilateral trade sanctions. Congressman Charlie Stenholm asked agricultural producers at a series of public hearings earlier this year about unilateral trade sanctions, or the imposition of an embargo by a single nation.

“The question I asked was, ‘Do you believe the United States should lift all unilaterally imposed embargos on food and medicine to other countries?’” Stenholm said. “Ninety percent of the audience, 97 percent of the witnesses and more would like to see them lifted because they simply do not work.”

Stenholm accompanied Texas Farm Bureau President Donald Patman and the TFB Board of Directors to Cuba on April 24 as part of a trade and fact-finding mission to the island nation.

Patman said in a Havana interview that the Farm Bureau went to Cuba to learn about agricultural product needs and to identify the persons who can make sales happen eventually. Even more pressing, he said, was the need to continue pressure on Congress and the Clinton Administration to lift the embargo as it applies to food and medicine.

At a news conference in Havana, Patman said, “Using food as a weapon has a sorry history. It almost never works.With regard to Cuba, we feel the embargo has failed in a spectacular fashion. Texas farmers and ranchers could easily and profitably supply many of the products both used and needed here in Cuba.”

Stenholm said that, in many ways, the embargo is standing in the way of change in Cuba.

“We’re not going to change their system immediately, but I have a sense that if we could start selling them some of our Texas agricultural products, their system would change a lot faster than any other way, particularly maintaining an embargo that’s failed for the last 40 years,” he said.

All the trip’s participants reported that the Cuban people like Americans and have intense curiosity for things American.

A trip to the countryside near Havana, and Cuba’s large cooperative farms was very informative, Stenholm said. Experiments in free enterprise seem to be working, as farmers are allowed to keep more of the fruits of their labor.

Everywhere the group went, it seems there was evidence of need for American pro-ducts in Cuba. Urban Havana is a curious mix of modern architecture and severe poverty. On the cooperative farms, the group learned of the low protein livestock rations that are not up to American standards.

Rancher Anton Haner said, “Their basic livestock feed is ground-up sugar cane, very low in protein.”

The sugar cane is augmented by natural forages and some urea as an additive.

Haner said trade with the U.S. would provide the opportunity for Cuba to upgrade their agricultural production standards. Currently, most grain imports are used for human consumption.

Rice farmer Bob Reed said that rice held special interest for representatives of the Cuban government in discussion with the Farm Bureau group. Rice is a key component of the Cuban diet. In the days before the embargo, much of the Texas rice crop, high quality, long-grain rice, was shipped to Cuba. It was obvious that consumers there would love to have the chance to buy it again.

Though some Cubans are clearly not happy with their economic status, there is no serious movement against the government of Fidel Castro. In that respect, the embargo has clearly failed.

There is hope in Cuba, and for some in the U.S., that a new middle class will soon establish itself, built almost entirely on a tourist trade that shows much promise. Tourists from Europe, Asia, Canada and South America are beginning to rediscover Cuba, a tourist mecca in the pre-Castro days. The climate, beaches and friendly people are still there, amid the decay of a failing socialist economy.

The tourist trade is conducted in U.S. dollars, and Cuban tourist industry workers are enjoying an unprecedented prosperity. For this fledgling industry to prosper, dependable and reasonably priced sources of food will have to be found.

With the ports of Beaumont, Houston and New Orleans less than a week’s shipping distance from Havana, the potential is enormous, and the Texas Farm Bureau is determined that producers from the Lone Star State have first shot at what could become a very important market.

Perhaps even more important to the Farm Bureau is the whole idea of unilateral sanctions. It represents a mindset in the U.S. government that the withholding of food can be a political weapon. With U.S. agriculture struggling, farmers feel that trade opportunities should be explored wherever they exist.

“I see expanded trade as an opportunity for U.S. producers to depend less on government support,” said Waco area producer Hope Huffman. “As a producer, I want to be able to do what I do best, make a decent living from it, be able to sell it to someone who needs the product, and therefore I don’t have to depend on the government.”

It is a sentiment that is growing in agriculture, but the leadership of the U.S. House does not share it. A bill removing unilateral sanctions of food and medicine has been introduced in the U.S. Senate, where similar legislation passed last year.

Stenholm worries that the Republican leadership of the House will not allow a vote in the House. The bill died in that fashion last year.

“We have strong opposition from leaders of the House in even talking about it right now, but who knows what might happen?” Stenholm said.

He offers the verdict of the public hearings as evidence of agriculture’s unity on the subject. For the producers who visited Cuba in April, the end of unilateral sanctions is an idea whose time is overdue.