Word: cuba
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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...
...long-term goal, in theory, is to change Cuba. The SmithKline deal led to long and apparently educational meetings between U.S. executives and Cuban officials such as Concepcion Campa, 48. Campa is director of the state-run Finlay Institute, the Havana bio-research facility at which she created the meningitis vaccine. But she's also a communist Politburo member, and she got a crash course in capitalist haggling during the negotiations, as well as a closer, less ideological understanding of Americans. "It was hard to make sense of all those Anglo-Saxon contract clauses," she told TIME. "But we appreciated...