Trouble on Calle Ocho

Decisions on which drugs should be available to the American public should be up to the Food and Drug Administration, but since everything regarding Cuba is political, there is politics involved in the possibility that a new Cuban drug could become available for prescription here.

The drug is Heberprot, a medication developed in Cuba for injection in diabetes patients to prevent leg amputations.  The issue that will come before our government is whether Heberprot can be submitted to clinical trials in the United States to test its safety and efficacy.

Rep. Joe Garcia supports the idea, alone among South Florida legislators.  Good for him. 

Predictably, there’s opposition from his Cuban American colleagues and silence from Rep. Wasserman Shultz, for whom foreign policy outweighs a potential benefit in the care of diabetes patients. 

Most interesting of all, President George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, is working for the company that would conduct the trials and market the drug if they are successful.

Herald coverage here.

Odds and ends

·         Fidel Castro was moved to take pen to paper in yesterday’s Granma by the Russian newspaper story that suggested that Cuba bent to U.S. pressure and denied permission to NSA leaker Edward Snowden to enter Cuban territory.  Fidel doesn’t deny that Cuba said “no” to Snowden, but he says it’s a “lie” that U.S. pressure was the reason.  My hunch is that at a time when Snowden was looking for a way our of Moscow and the U.S. government wanted no government to accommodate him, Cuba judged decided for its own reasons that Snowden would be nothing but a headache.

·         Tracey Eaton notes USAID’s new on-line system for reporting grant information and posts this list of Cuba grants.  One small transaction involves Freedom House replacing “the existing travel clause in its entirety with the new travel clause.”

·         National Review on the father of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who in his youth “linked up with Castro’s guerrilla groups and supported their attempts to overthrow Batista,” and came to regret it.

·         In recently released Nixon White House tapes, our 37th President talks with his staff about the FBI investigation of the Watergate break-in, where his campaign’s burglars entered the headquarters of the Democratic Party.  He wonders why the FBI director doesn’t cooperate in steering the investigation in a way favorable to the White House (“What’s the matter with Pat Gray,” he asks).  He urges the squelching of a line of investigation involving Cuban Americans in Miami, saying the FBI should be told it would “open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.”

·         A document on the U.S. intelligence budget leaked to the Washington Post summarizes counterintelligence priorities – Cuba is included, but so are allies and U.S. aid recipients such as Pakistan and Israel: “To further safeguard our classified networks, we continue to strengthen insider threat detection capabilities across the Community. In addition, we are investing in target surveillance and offensive CI against key targets, such as China, Russia, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and Cuba.”

Odds and ends

• Cuban media continue covering the Snowden case without mentioning that he has requested asylum in Cuba.  These articles discuss his requests to Brazil and Russia, and this foreign ministry statement slams U.S. pressure on other countries.

• There were changes in the membership of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, including the departure of U.S. expert and former National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon.  The changes represent a “natural process,” the Granma story says.  Raul Castro recalled an agreement made in the last party conference by which members of party committees “at all levels should submit their resignations from their posts when they consider that the reasons for their elections no longer obtain.”  Hence Alarcon and four others, all of whom had left high-level posts elsewhere, left the Central Committee.  Here’s the list of the Central Committee’s 112 members, not yet updated.  More from BBC.

• Radio Marti on the changes in the Cuban penal code that opens the door for reduced sentences in criminal cases.

• The Herald on the latest twist in the case of former Rep. David Rivera’s re-election campaign.

• Financial Times on Cuba’s real estate market.

• El Nuevo has an affectionate profile of the guys at Babalu, ten years into their enterprise.

• “There’s an awful lot to like about this kid,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said after seeing Cuban phenom Yasiel Puig play with the Dodgers last month.  More from Bill Plashke in the Los Angeles Times.

Tampa speaks up

Miami-Dade is the U.S. capital of engagement with Cuba, with dozens of flights per week filled mainly with Cuban Americans.  Many of those flights require a second cargo-only plane to carry passengers’ excess baggage, a large and uncounted stream of U.S. exports to Cuba.  Cuban Americans have responded enthusiastically to openings in Cuba, helping relatives there open businesses and acquire real estate, so much so that a friend of mine calls Miami-Dade one of Cuba’s largest trading partners. 

But Miami’s political leadership still represents, with the partial exception of Rep. Joe Garcia, the views of those Cuban Americans who oppose all engagement with Cuba.

Tampa’s engagement with Cuba is far less than Miami’s, although its connections with Cuba are far deeper, going back more than a century to the days when Jose Marti went there to seek the local Cuban community’s support for Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain.

In contrast to Miami, Tampa’s political and business leadership stands up for engagement with Cuba and wants more of it.  Three city council members just joined the Tampa Chamber of Commerce in a trip to Cuba.  How strong is the political push?  Look at Rep. Kathy Castor’s April letter to President Obama calling for a comprehensive reform of Cuba policy. 

What is the trend?  It would be wrong to underestimate the strength of the pro-embargo forces – note Congressional voting patterns, the Florida legislature’s passage of legislation to punish firms that do business with Cuba, and the fact that Senator Nelson remains in Miami’s camp, not Tampa’s. 

But the changes taking place are important.  No other state has stood so strong for the Cuba embargo, and the strength of its argument in presidential politics was sapped by the 50-50 split in the Cuban-American vote in the 2012 election.  Tampa’s argument for change based on economic and foreign policy interests can only augur well for the future.

Odds and ends

• Herald: One of Rep. Joe Garcia’s staffers is gone and another is on leave after the feds searched their homes in an election fraud probe.  During last year’s Democratic primary election they allegedly went on-line, using computers with masked IP addresses, to request absentee ballots in the names of hundreds of voters.  It is not clear from any of the articles how they planned to obtain the absentee ballots, once issued.  In the event, authorities smelled something fishy and did not act on the requests.  Garcia says he did not know of the scheme.  He is cooperating in the investigation and conducting his own investigation, and while he is angry about the scheme, he said: “I think it was a well-intentioned attempt to maximize voter turnout.”  Strange.  The primary was already marred by apparent fraud in the case of David Rivera’s straw-man candidate Justin Lamar Sternad.  Now it appears to be bipartisan.

• Herald: The Florida law designed to punish the Brazilian firm Odebrecht for the business it does in Cuba was struck down by a federal appeals court.  Earlier note on the Florida law here.

·         Progreso Weekly interviews Jorge Pinon of the University of Texas on Cuba’s energy future.  Note his comments on ethanol, the untapped resource that could revive sugar production, creating jobs and producing by his estimate 70,000 barrels of the fuel per day.  See also Reuters on the Russian company Zarubezhneft that is abandoning a deep-water exploration project and says it will be back next year.

• El Pais on the difficult story of the 115 Cuban dissidents who were released from jail and went to Spain (along with 650 relatives) in 2011: “big intentions, insufficient planning, too many surprises, and very few resources.”

·         Diario de Cuba: Cuba’s national baseball team will come to the United States to play a few games next month.  As for Cubans in the majors, the Dodgers called up outfielder Yasiel Puig and he’s not doing badly, hitting a grand slam last night; see also here and here.

• JTA: Jailed USAID contractor Alan Gross settled his lawsuit with DAI, his employer, and his separate suit against the U.S. government was dismissed.  There’s more at Along the Malecon.  CNN reports that Cuba will permit a U.S. doctor to examine Gross; last September his family requested such an examination.

·         Havana Times has an English translation of an interview that the BBC’s Fernando Ravsberg did with Rene Gonzalez, one of the “Cuban Five” intelligence agents who completed his sentence in the United States and has returned to Cuba.

• El Pais interviews economics professor Carmelo Mesa-Lago on the economic reforms in Cuba.