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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.”

1. Charlie Crist: will he run for the Senate? is he the shoo-in that many believe he is? Who becomes our next governor? http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/article993121.ece
2. Is Obama a wimp? The NYT questions Obama’s determination for a good fight and details how he has compromised and capitulated. And is Obama too enamored with being on TV and being a star and not enough on producing the change he promised? What about this handshake with Hugo Chavez? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/us/politics/19lobby.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
3. Cuba: Are we on the verge of a major shift in US policy toward Cuba? And isn’t it about freaking time? http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jnp5o6f7sbCCvHBAVdsf38VK0CxgD97LLCIG0 and http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/apr/18/tampa-has-thirst-cuba-trade-travel/news-money/

Download it or listen on the player after the jump:

From The New York Times:

A top Russian Air Force official said that the government was weighing whether to base strategic bombers out of Cuban territory or on a Venezuelan island that has been offered by President Hugo Chávez, according to the Interfax news service.

In comments made at an awards ceremony on Friday night, Maj. Gen. Anatoly Zhikharev, chief of staff for Russia’s long-distance aviation division, told reporters that either option would be practical.

“There are four or five airfields in Cuba with 4,000-meter-long runways, which absolutely suit us,” he said. “If the two chiefs of state display such a political will, we are ready to fly there.”

Notice came just before midnight Tuesday. The decision is described as a pause in all war-crimes proceedings.

The decision will temporarily stop the prosecution of five detainees charged as the coordinators of the Sept. 11 attacks, including the case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Your historic elections provides an opportunity to make important changes both here at home and abroad. I respectfully urge you to breathe fresh air into our relationship with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean and to modernize policies relaating to Cuba. I encourage you to lift the restructions that limit family travel to Cuba and limit the amount of remittance that families may send to relatives in Cuba through an executive order soon after your inauguration in 2009.

The embargo (el bloqueo) allows family members to travel back to Cuba only once every three years and limits the amount of money that can be sent to relatives there to $300 a year.

The restrictions have proven ineffective in altering the political situation and interfere with fundamental family relations and human rights. By lifting the burdensome restrictions, we can provide relief to families while maintaining the pressure for human rights and change the island needs.

You can download the full letter here.

Fidel Castro’s stepping down mark’s the beginning of the end of Cuba’s darkest era in its history.

Unfortunately, this change is insufficient in bringing freedom to Cuba that will continue to be ruled by dictator who is not democratically elected.

The future of Cuba must be determined by the Cuban people and not by a Dictator and his hand picked anti-democratic replacement regime.

If the new regime wishes to break from the past and show progress, it should release all of the political prisoners and prisoners of conscience who have been seeking freedoms long denied the Cuban people. These heroes and fighters of freedom need to be released.

If and when the new Cuban leadership demonstrates meaningful democratic change, like free elections and the release of prisoners, the United States needs to seize the opportunity to take steps that encourage this and seek more progress. The freedom of the Cuban people is a cause that should bring all Americans together.

And William Redpath, chairman of the Libertarian Party:

The current U.S. policy towards Cuba hurts American businesses by denying them access to the Cuban market, which in turn hurts the Cuban people by denying them the benefits of trade with the United States.

There have been two victims of the 45-year embargo on Cuba, and neither are the Cuban government. American agriculture and trade industries have been throttled by the United States’ sanctions on Cuba by restricting their ability to trade freely.  The loss of trade with Cuba in turn harms the Cuban people, who would enjoy higher-income salaries through trade with American corporations and through increased American tourism.  Instead of the Cuban government suffering from U.S.-Cuba foreign policy, it has been American enterprise and the Cuban society.

(Fidel Castro in the US in 1959. source: Library of Congress via Wikipedia)

Fidel Castro is stepping down as el presidente de Cuba, the mass media is widely reporting:

The end of Castro’s rule — the longest in the world for a head of government — frees his 76-year-old brother Raul to implement reforms he has hinted at since taking over as acting president when Fidel Castro fell ill in July 2006. President Bush said he hopes the resignation signals the beginning of a democratic transition.

“My wishes have always been to discharge my duties to my last breath,” Castro wrote in a letter published Tuesday in the online edition of the Communist Party daily Granma. But, he wrote, “it would be a betrayal to my conscience to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than I am physically able to offer.”

While this really actually changes very little in Cuba, it is prompting low-key celebrations in Miami and other Cuban strongholds. Worse, it signals no change at all in the wrongheaded nearly five-decade old US policy of embargo toward the island nation that once was an economic brother for Tampa:

[President George W.] Bush, traveling in Rwanda, pledged to “help the people of Cuba realize the blessings of liberty.”

“The international community should work with the Cuban people to begin to build institutions that are necessary for democracy,” he said. “Eventually, this transition ought to lead to free and fair elections — and I mean free, and I mean fair — not these kind of staged elections that the Castro brothers try to foist off as true democracy.”

The United States built a detailed plan in 2005 for American assistance to ensure a democratic transition on the island of 11.2 million people after Castro’s death. But Cuban officials have insisted that the island’s socialist political and economic systems will outlive Castro.

“The adversary to be defeated is extremely strong,” Castro wrote Tuesday. “However, we have been able to keep it at bay for half a century.”

Realize the blessings of liberty? How about trading with them?!? Never in the history of this nation has a foreign policy directive been so wildly unsuccessful or poorly thought out. The idea was to isolate Castro and drive him from office. Instead, Castro became popular throughout Latin America and the longest-serving head of a nation in the world. And who suffered? The people of Cuba and the families that were split up via immigration to the United States.

The Republican Party of Florida weighed in by the afternoon with a predictable statement from Chairman Jim Greer:

“Today we see a faint light at the end of the tunnel as Cuban dictator Fidel Castro officially steps aside. However, with his brother Raul remaining in power, the oppression and lack of respect for human rights continues in Cuba.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the Cuban people, and the many Floridians with family and friends still living under the rule of the Castro family regime. We look forward to the end of this horrendous dictatorship, and the day when the Cuban people see Democratic elections and know the freedoms we as Americans are privileged to enjoy each and every day.”

My thoughts and prayers, to the contrary, are going to finding enough time to smoke a Cuban cigar this afternoon and hope that we as a nation come to our senses and restore full relations with Cuba immediately.