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By Manny Leto
PoHo contributor and editor, Cigar City Magazine

You may not have even known it was happening, but “Rapprochement With Cuba: Good For Tampa Bay, Good For Florida, Good For America,” a conference sponsored by the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation and held Saturday at the Italian Club in Ybor City, was, by its very existence, a milestone in repairing the tattered relationship between Tampa and Cuba.

About 150 guests, panelists, professors and local politicians filled the grand, neo-classical Italian Club, once the social, cultural and political epicenter of Tampa’s Italian community. Whether the speeches, panel discussions, and networking sessions will really accomplish much toward ending the 50-year-old U.S. embargo, no one is really sure. However, to get a sense of where the Cuba barometer is pointing, you could start with the venue itself.

In 1955, a young, verbose Fidel Castro arrived in Ybor City. This was no accident, no anomaly. In fact, it made perfect sense. Castro, in a bid to gain popular support for his uprising against CIA-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, he followed — literally — in the footsteps of an earlier young, charismatic Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti.

Marti was the ideological voice of the first Cuban Revolution; the one American school children call the Spanish American War. In the 1890s, after an earlier 10-year conflict between Spain and native Cubans, Jose Marti rose to the fore of a new effort to oust Spain from the island of Cuba. Like Castro, Marti was an intellectual, a writer, poet. He traveled extensively throughout Florida between 1891 and 1895, raising money for Cuban independence. He visited Tampa some 20 times, giving speeches to Tampa’s cigar workers and strategizing with the exiled leadership headquartered in West Tampa and New York City. Marti’s revolution began in 1895. Teddy Roosevelt and the U.S. Army showed up a couple years later, in 1898.

So, 60 years later in 1955, Castro was on a PR tour of sorts that would take him to New York City and the cover of Time magazine but first, he spent some time in Ybor City. His choice for a speaking venue: The Italian Club. He met with then-club president Phil LoCicero at La Tropicana, where the two reportedly talked for hours. Castro’s request to rent the Italian hall was denied, as was his request to speak at the Cuban Club. Castro eventually rented the AFL-CIO Union Hall on 7th Avenue and 13th Street, which is today home of the Marti-Maceo Social Club.

On Saturday, 54 years after Fidel Castro was denied use of the club and 114 years after Marti rallied Tampa’s cigar workers to action, nearly 200 people, Republicans, Democrats, entrepreneurs, cattle ranchers, and exiled Cubans, gathered in Ybor City to talk, once more, about Cuba.

Rain drove the only five protesters away, even though Al Fox, the event organizer, invited them to come in for coffee and doughnuts.

Fox, president of the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy, assembled an impressive lineup of experts including an adviser on Cuba policy for the Kennedy Administration, Dr. Wayne Smith; former head of the Democratic Party of Florida, Alfredo Duran; and, via conference call, U.S. Congressman Bill Delahunt, D-MA, who has sponsored a bill to lift restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba. The bill has several co-sponsors including Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican; Rosa Delauro, Jo-Ann Emerson, a Missouri Republican; Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican; Ron Paul, a Texas Republican.

Locally, Tampa Congresswoman Kathy Castor, who was conspicuously absent on Saturday, has expressed her support for establishing direct flights between Tampa and Havana, to compete for business with Miami International Airport.

“Every time a flight leaves Miami for Havana, the airport collects roughly 50 dollars per passenger and other assorted baggage fees,” said local business owner Jason Busto, adding, “People who are opposed [to increased contact and trade with Cuba] are using a playbook from the 1980s.”

Business interests were in full force at Saturday’s meeting, eager to capitalize on reestablishing trade with the island.

“We’re exporting democracy and capitalism,” said Richard Waltzer, head of the Havana Group, a “facilitator” for companies looking to do business in Cuba, who says the two are linked. “We buy more products from China than any other nation. What’s the difference between China and Cuba?”

John Parke Wright, a cattleman who traces his Tampa roots back to Capt. James McKay and James Lykes, was also on hand. Donning a suit, cowboy boots and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, Park Wright wants to see Tampa and Cuba’s cattle trade “back on the map.”

Indeed Tampa’s connections to Cuba extend beyond Castro’s 1955 visit, beyond cigars and Jose Marti. In the 1840s, Captain James McKay (He of McKay Bay) began shipping cattle to Cuba from Ballast Point in Tampa. The still-prominent Lykes family was, by 1906 firmly established in Havana, operating one of the largest cattle ranches on the island. They also operated the Lykes Steamship Company, which shipped cattle and other goods between Tampa, Havana, and New Orleans.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Henry Plant operated a steamship line, which traveled weekly between Tampa, Key West and Havana. Ironically, at the very center of Tampa’s city seal is the Olivette, a one of Plant’s steamships that traveled regularly to Cuba.

The connections are even deeper. When the Spanish sold Florida to the U.S. in 1824, they may have taken groups of Cuban fishermen with them back to Havana.

In the 1500s Spanish conquistadores “governed” and explored Tampa Bay via Havana.

Havana is our sister city, said City Councilwoman Linda Saul-Sena. “Economically, socially, culturally, we are kin.”

It may have been the worst news conference performance by a sitting Speaker of the House ever. Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi harmed her own cause and ratcheted up the torture debate in a newser in which she parsed her knowledge of CIA waterboarding briefings and accused the spy agency of lying to Congress.

Even Florida’s former Sen. Bob Graham (and his infamous lil’ notebooks) has leapt to her side, telling HuffPo that he, too, was lied to by the CIA about torture tactics and use. From that interview:

“When this issue started to resurface I called the appropriate people in the agency and said I would like to know the dates from your records that briefings were held,” Graham recalled. “And they contacted me and gave me four dates — two in April ‘02 and two in September ‘02. Now, one of the things I do, and for which I have taken some flack, is keep a spiral notebook of what I do throughout the day. And so I went through my records and through a combination of my daily schedule, which I keep, and my notebooks, I confirmed and the CIA agreed that my notes were accurate; that three of those four dates there had been no briefing. There was only one day that I had been briefed, which was September the 27th of 2002.”

Video of the full Pelosi news conference after the jump.

And here is how MSNBC played it:

So where does the truth stand in all of this? It’s muddy.

• Liberal Media Matters defends Pelosi and says the nets are ignoring a caveat on the original CIA notes that say they may not be accurate accounts of the briefings.
• The Hill says this is a classic “change the subject” move by Republicans, since Pelosi didn’t participate in ordering the torture and certainly doesn’t condone it today.
• Pelosi, however, raised the stakes in the fight over future torture investigations and possible criminal prosecutions by accusing the CIA of lying to Congress, Political Wire says.
• “Pelosi, CIA should have one of those Twitter fights, loser goes to jail.” — Wonkette

Documents released this week show that 92 such videotapes were destroyed, much higher than the two tapes that were previously known to have been destroyed.

The AP reports:

The acknowledgment of dozens of destroyed tapes came in a letter filed by government lawyers in New York, where the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking more details of terror interrogation programs.

“The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed,” said the letter by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin. “Ninety two videotapes were destroyed.”

The tapes became a contentious issue in the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, after prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.

From: “NYTimes.com News Alert” <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
Reply-To: <nytdirect@nytimes.com>
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 14:36:19 -0500
Subject: News Alert: Leon E. Panetta to Be Named C.I.A. Director

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Monday, January 5, 2009 — 2:32 PM ET
—–

Leon E. Panetta to Be Named C.I.A. Director

President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta,
the former congressman and White House chief of staff, to
take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization
that Mr. Obama criticized during the campaign for using
interrogation methods he decried as torture, Democratic
officials said Monday.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

UPDATE: NBC News and other outlets are now reporting the same.