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Americans Plan to Sell off Castro's Sugar and Tourism

US investors are planning for an event they now believe imminent: the downfall of President Fidel Castro of Cuba. Exiles in the US are wooing them to pump huge sums into a post-communist Cuba. Founder president of the Cuban American National Foundation, Jorge Mas Canosa, has announced plans to sell off the island's major industries, including sugar and tourism. Meanwhile, Washington is tightening economic noose around Cuba.

Mohamed Hamaludin writes from Miami
Enactment of a law tightening the economic noose around the Fidel Castro government of Cuba and persistent reports of demoralisation among the communist Island's population are again raising hopes in Miami's exile community.
So confident are Cuban exile leaders now that Castro's fall is imminent that the most powerful Cuban outside the island has been holding meetings with US investors to persuade them to stand ready to pump huge sums into a post communlst administration. And they seem willing to do so.
Jorge Mas Canosa. founder president of the Cuban American National Foundation, announced plans to sell off the island’s major Industries, including the all-Important sugar and tourism, most likely to Americans, in a privatisation binge.
On Castro's fall, the Foundation will gather investors, stockbrokers and bankers for a voyage to Cuba in a "ship of hope". Mas Canosa told the CBS television.
That comment fits Into previous reports that arrangements have been concluded with virtually every franchising operation to open businesses in Cuba in the post-communist era.
None of the reports gives any indication as to whether the 10 million or so Cubans on the island have had any say in these plans and whether they would welcome the Intended largesse of foreign dollars and democracy.
Mas Canosa's Foundation has become well connected In US political circles since it was established 12 years ago, doing little to refuse suggestions that ft is a "government In waiting.'' Mass Canosa, after some probing, admitted that he has given thought to becoming the next president of Cuba.
'■ For him and the 600,000 or so Cuban* who live here.
communism is still very much alive and the Cold War. at least in miniature form, is far from over. Cuban exile politics, indeed, has been Influencing US domestic politics and international relations.
Central to the new feeling of euphoria is the so-called "Cuban Democracy Act”, tacked on to the Defence Appropriations Bill and passed by the Senate and the House of Representatives by a large ma-
jority earlier this year. President George Bush initially objected to the Bill and kept it unsigned on his desk.
After his Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton, was persuaded by Mas Canosa to endorse it. Bush not only announced suppprt but brought the Bill to Miami to sign it in front of the exiles. But he refused to invite the Bill's two Democrat sponsors In the Senate, Robert Torricelli of
New Jersey, after whom the measure was unofficially z named, and Bob Graham of Florida.
The law's main provision is a ban against foreign subsidiaries of US companies doing business with Cuba. Bush's initial objection was that the law would infringe on the sovereignty of other nations — and he was right. But he went ahead anyway with the signing because he needed Florida's support for his re-election and the Cubans arc a small but important part of the state's electorate.
Reaction came even before he signed the Bill. Canada and Britain passed their own laws requiring subsidiaries of American firms operating in their territory to Ignore the US ban, or face stiff penalties.
Even some Cuban exiles objected, believing the law would block badly needed shipments of food and medicines to the island. Roman Catholic bishops in Cuba also came out in opposition, on similar humanitarian grounds. Castro deemed it further economic aggression, as he has described the economic embargo Imposed by the US since the failed Bay of Pigs invasion three decades ago.
Exile leaders and their US supporters are hoping that the impact of the law will be a further erosion In the living standards and the quality of the life of the Cuban people following the collapse of the Soviet bloc — the island s economic patrons and main trading partners.
US journalists paint a grim picture of condition* in the
country. The Miami Herald'* senior foreign correspondent Andress Oppenheimer, spent five month* In Cuba over a two-year period and his book Castro's Final Hour, makes riveting reading, though It is a hostile interpretation of event*. Other accounts describe a gloomy state of affairs, with corruption rampant and hope dim.
The journalists say the economic deficit is too big for Castro to close and that corruption, now an entrenched way of life, coupled with wholesale disaffection, will at least destabilise the regime.
Castro and his senior advisers predicted the current grim state of affairs as the Soviet dominoes were falling, but there was little he could do independently to insulate the economy. Cuba had been forced to abandon its self-sufll-ciency programmes a dozen years earlier when it became necessary for Havana to link its economy with that of the Soviet bloc through the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA).
With Soviet Union and CMEA both gone, Castro found himself holding on even stronger to his communist philosophy but with an economy in tatters. He began to take parts of the Cuban economy back almost to the pre-industrial age.
With oil the most critical shortage, cars are being replaced with hundreds of thousands of Chinese-made bicycles. Animal-drawn carts are taking the place of trucks.
At the same time. Castro has allowed two sectors of the economy-tourism and biotechnology to become capitalist —-1n hopes they will provide a hard currency Infusion for the rest of the centrally.
At the same time. Castro has allowed two sector* of the economy-tourism and biotechnology to become capitalist — in hopes they will provide a hard currency Infusion for the rest of the centrally-planned, gravely ill economy. This has led to a rigid separation of Cubans from the amenities set aside specially for foreigners, the ones with dollar*.
Castro is not willing to open up the rest of the economy, even to local private Initiative, feeling that he would lose control. That is the same argument he uses for restating calls for political reforms, including elections. His ad minis tratton have lost virtually all their allies abroad — the Soviet bloc, the Sandinistas In Nicaragua, Oen. Manuel
Norciga In Itenama. The closest they now have to a friend In office Is probably Cheddi Jagan. whose Marxist Peoples Progressive Party has won elections In Guyana after 26 years In opposition. But 1t Is doubtful If Jagan would be willing to risk Washington's displeasure and actively engage Castro.
In fact. Washington recently sent a signal of disapproval when It was learnt that the Caribbean Community, of which Guyana is a part, had decided to set up a Mixed Commission to strengthen relations between the two sides.
But even as he has been circling his wagons even tighter, there have been small indications that Castro may not have ruled out the possibility of accommodation altogether, once it is not seen as resulting from pressure from the "Yanqut tm-pertallsts." Cuban officials have been making frequent visits to Miami to engage exiles tn dialogue and an increasingly vocal but still small minority of exiles has been speaking out about a need to tone down the rhetoric.
The closest Indication of Castro's thinking may have come through Carlos Moore, an Afro-Cuban given asylum by France and now a professor in Guadeloupe. Moore, a former senior Cuban foreign ministry official, who is believed to have contact with important Sources in Havana, wrote *n Impassioned appeal tn June to Black American Congressmen and other leading African-Americans to block the Torricelli Bill. And he pro-posed that the focus on Cuba-US relations be turned to working out a rapprochement.
Moore urged the setting up of a "Hemispheric Mediation Council" to draft a "peace plan" as the framework for normalising relations.
He wrote: There are dignified ways available to both the Cuban and American governments. which exclude violence and wanton destruction, to resolve the Cuban American crisis as well as Cuba's own domestic predicament, if such is the will.
Thus far, the governments of both sides have listened only to the most extreme voices: those of people who, with little or no concern for the consequences, are doggedly and narrow-mindedly pursuing selfish Intereats.'
But, with Bush signing of the law and Castro digging in for a long winter of discontent, little has changed to Indicate moderate voices like Moore's are having any impact on the sustained hostility that ha* been the hallmark of US-Cuban relations for over a generation
- GEMINI NEWS
MOHAMED HAMAUJtMN is Managing Editor of Miami Times. IM utao Jorrnariy Guyana tnrrripauirnl o/ tho Caribbean Now Agmry