Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years Cuba's communist dictator, Fidel Castro, has chafed, rattled and raged under the cold-war headlock of a U.S. trade embargo. But this past summer the wily presidente sensed an opening. Philadelphia health-care-products giant SmithKline Beecham (a subsidiary of SmithKline Beecham in Britain) got the Clinton Administration's O.K. to pay Cuba some $20 million for the rights to test and market, in the U.S., a meningitis vaccine developed by Cuban scientists. Embargo rules still require SmithKline to pay initially in barter instead of dollars--a Yanqui condition that aides expected Castro to reject. To their surprise...
Castro is betting that a serious antiembargo movement is afoot--and, for once, he's right. The SmithKline deal marks "a significant moment for U.S. companies who want opportunities in Cuba," says John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council in New York. It also reflects the sentiment of U.S. politicians and business leaders--not to mention lovers of Cuba's famed cigars--who are mounting a campaign to dismantle Washington's economic sanctions against Cuba. They're convinced that the embargo will never make Castro cry uncle, a point he will drive home this week...
...time is ripe, they insist, to invade Cuba again, not with an exile army but with the same products--Nike shoes, burgers and MTV--that have helped promote democracy and capitalism around the world. If the U.S. can do business with erstwhile enemies like China and Russia, they argue, why not with Cuba? "This embargo hasn't helped us move the ball," U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Thomas Donohue said last month. "We have carried this anger...
What exasperates the embargo busters most is watching foreign competitors' cutting tourism and other lucrative deals on an island of 11 million repressed consumers just half an hour's flight from Miami. Feeling that ire, the White House this year further loosened U.S. travel restrictions to Cuba, making it easier for Americans like business executives, researchers and athletes--as well as families with kin in Cuba--to board a charter flight in Miami, New York City or Los Angeles that lands in Havana. Donohue paid Castro a visit last July, the first ever by a U.S. Chamber of Commerce chief...
Ashcroft has clear support in the Senate--and behind the scenes among some in the Administration--since a Reuters poll last spring found that 67% of Americans favor ending the embargo. "It's hard for me to find anyone in this building who supports our Cuba policy anymore," says a State Department official. In Florida, where the most ardent anti-Castro lobby resides, a recent Miami Herald survey showed more people against than for the embargo. Meanwhile, cultural contacts between the U.S. and Cuba are at an all-time high, sponsored in large part by U.S. corporations like...