Posted on 09/30/2002 2:36:28 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Havana, Cuba - Quite apart from any deals struck here, the landmark U.S.-Cuba trade show that ends Monday has been a public relations windfall for Fidel Castro, who has played the solicitous host with charm and mastery.
The old man of history has left some of his American guests aglow. Others are shaking their heads at his pure political skill.
At the fair's official dinner Saturday night, Castro delivered a 20-minute speech, thanking the Americans here for their "initiative and courage" and praising the "great values and human virtues we have always recognized in the American people."
Given the Bush administration's avid commitment to the 43-year-old trade embargo, and Cuba's deep desire to see it end, the presence of more than 700 U.S. farmers, businesspeople and journalists has provided Castro with a unique opportunity to advance his agenda.
He has made the most of it, working the hall, hosting intimate receptions and large extravaganzas, making cross-cultural gestures of solidarity between communist Cuba and the American heartland.
At a gala performance of Cuban entertainers, a choir sang "Camptown Races" and a Christian hymn. Little Cuban and U.S. flags are paired everywhere. Interpreter at his side, Castro has held a series of private state-by-state gatherings, lingering, joking, playfully debating with his astonished guests, plunging into the minutiae of crop production, livestock herds and child nutrition.
Eleven Iowans dined at the presidential palace Friday, where "El Comandante" greeted them at the door and saw them out long after midnight. They had their pictures taken individually with Castro. The women went home with roses, the men with Cohiba cigars.
"It's really hard for me to say this as a child of the '50s and '60s, but the man was funny!" said Iowa Agriculture Secretary Patty Judge. "Just one-liner after one-liner."
Measuring out portions of buffalo milk for the group to sample, Castro worried he wouldn't have enough. He turned the occasion into a mock political science discourse.
"When we make the portions small but everybody's getting the same milk and there's milk left over, that's socialism," Castro said, laughing "hysterically," according to Judge. "If we pour out all the milk and share equally, that's communism."
He digressed at length about the Cuban revolution, telling Judge that "if he was that ruthless he would not have won, because the people's support was with him."
Meeting with Kentuckians on Thursday, he cited America's Revolutionary War-era slogan of "No taxation without representation."
Sounding like a Republican knocking big government, he suggested that America's new slogan should be "no taxation."
His guests have learned that he eats little, asks lots of questions and talks about a great many things.
Talking about livestock
Castro lavished special attention on one young, articulate and affable Minnesota farm family caring for the five pairs of U.S.-bred bison, sheep, pigs, beef cattle and dairy cattle here. Breeder Ralph Kaehler, his wife, Mena, and his sons Cliff, 13, and Seth, 11, talked livestock with Castro in the exhibition hall.
The Cuban leader then made them his special guests at the Thursday night gala at the Karl Marx theater; he sat with the blond-haired boys at his side while Cuba's finest dancers, singers and musicians performed to rousing ovations.
When Castro entered the theater, Americans joined Cubans in standing and warmly applauding the 76-year-old autocrat - a sight that left a striking impression on many in the audience.
"Who would have thought 400 or 500 Americans would stand up and clap for Fidel Castro? That doesn't happen every day," said Kirby Jones, a veteran consultant on business in Cuba.
Some interpreted it as a natural and polite response to a hosting head of state; others detected more enthusiasm in the applause than they would have expected.
In his speech Saturday, Castro cast U.S. policy as placing as much of a burden on America as on Cuba, calling for an end to the embargo so "the hard-working American farmer will never again have to worry about finding markets" for his output.
If the trade show has been a PR coup for Castro, perhaps the biggest reason is that he has allowed the Americans themselves - suited corporate types, "regular" farm and business folk from the Deep South and upper Midwest - to make his case for him.
"If you believe as (President Bush) has said, he's for free trade, why not trade with our neighbors to the south?" Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Tommy Irvin, a Democrat, said after celebrating a contract to ship rice to Cuba.
Here was Irvin, like many other Americans on the trip, embracing Cuba while criticizing the Bush administration's foreign policy.
Are they being used?
Does this make these Americans servants of Castro's propaganda or objects of his manipulation, as Bush officials and anti-Castro Cuban-Americans suggested in advance of the trade show?
Some Americans here, such as Ralph Kaehler, are quite openly impressed by Castro, saying they find him genuine, funny and inquisitive.
"I hear all that stuff about how oppressed the people are. I don't see that," Irvin said in an interview. (At a recent anti-embargo conference in Washington, a Human Rights Watch official said the Cuban regime is guilty of "systematic and massive human rights violations.")
Some approvingly recite Castro's boasts about Cuba's record on health and education. Some can only be described as star-struck by his personality and historical celebrity.
Playing to the crowd
Others, though, offer no defense of the Cuban government and begin with the premise that Castro is extracting as much political value out of them as he possibly can.
Wisconsin businessman Tim Riemenschneider found it odd seeing Castro treated like an icon as he worked the exhibition hall Thursday.
"I'm a (former) military guy sitting there, saying, 'What's wrong with this picture?' " said Riemenschneider, international director for Chiquita Processed Foods, a private-label vegetable packer headquartered in New Richmond.
He assumes Castro, in embracing his U.S. guests, wants to "jam this down President Bush's throat." And he expects the trade show will help accomplish Castro's agenda, sending hundreds of businesspeople back to America with sharpened interest, producing more political pressure to ease the embargo further.
But even those who regard themselves as realists about the Cuban regime dispute the notion that they're simply being "played."
Their argument: The food sales are legal; they are being paid; and trade benefits both sides, the U.S. and Cuba.
"We've got everything to gain and nothing to lose," Irvin argued.
"I think we're all grown-ups," Judge said. "Most of us have been around the block a time or two and we can sort things out. The Cubans are definitely putting their best foot forward and rolling out every red carpet they've got."
But, Judge said, "I can sell them the products without ascribing to his form of government."
"What profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?" (Matthew 16:26)
No, actually you can't. trading with them is endorsing, condoning and abetting communism. period.
That's what BMW said about Hitler...
Bush has said he will ease the embargo if Castro begins to make moves away from communism and toward democracy. This would begin to improve the lives of Cubans living under Castro's communist regime. Castro prefers things the way they are. He's betting socialists on the Hill and ignorant, couldn't care less politicians, looking for campaign dollars from U.S. companies, and the elite LIBERAL U.S. media, consistent advocates of socialism, will bring pressure to bear on the remaining embargo rules (sell only in cash and restrict travel).
Castro wants to reverse U.S. policy thereby allowing financed sales to him. Ask the Europeans, Candians and old soviet allies, who have accepted Castro's worthless IOUs, what they think of that kind of arrangement.
Castro will fill his resorts with taxpayer subsidized goods and welcome tourists, in effect charging Americans twice for the priviledge of freeing up dollars so he can advance anti-American, anti-free market terrorism around the globe.
Useful fools use to be the term. Now it seems they're eager and willing partners in his brutal dictatorship.
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Public education.
We could add it's disturbing how Irving can be. ;)
Best Regards, Ivan
Fidel, Saddam and Hugo --An improbable but growing friendship of three military revolutionaries
Jay Nordlinger: WHO CARES ABOUT CUBA?***The oppositionists and their supports are extraordinarily, even disturbingly, grateful for any sincere attention they receive. They are accustomed to being snubbed or defamed. Another exile writes, "Prisoners cling to newspaper articles about human rights in Cuba as their only hope against being abandoned and forgotten. The sense of helplessness, that no one is listening, that no one cares, is what kills their souls. I've known many such people, including within my own family."
Back in the Reagan years, Jeane Kirkpatrick became a heroine in the Soviet Union for the simple act of naming names on the floor of the U.N.: naming the names of prisoners, citing their cases, inquiring after their fates. Later, in Moscow, she met Andrei Sakharov, who exclaimed, "Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski! I have so wanted to meet you and thank you in person. Your name is known in all the Gulag." And why was that? Because she had named those names, giving men and women in the cells a measure of hope. Kirkpatrick says now, "This much I have learned: It is very, very important to say the names, to speak them. It's important to go on taking account as one becomes aware of the prisoners and the torture they undergo. It's terribly important to talk about it, write about it, go on TV about it." A tyrannical regime depends on silence, darkness. "One of their goals is to make their opponents vanish. They want not only to imprison them, they want no one to have heard of them, no one to know who or where they are. So to just that extent, it's tremendously important that we pay attention."***
And Ford, GM, Dupont and many others as well.
Communist China probably has larger prison population than total number of Cubans (10 million). And no one complaints about "Made in China" Timberlands, Nikes and many other American icons.
Perhaps it's not fair to lambaste farm folks looking for a extra buck while big busines deals with devil.
Good answer!
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