img_3397.jpg

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.”

The upshot: The gov takes a lot of flights on private jets owned by some of the wealthiest and influential Florida corporate titans – or those who are angling to be. And his office doesn’t keep records on the flights.

From the story this weekend:

Crist regularly flies on the private jets of wealthy businessmen, the Sun Sentinel found, but the governor won’t disclose the details.

Over the past two years, Crist’s calendar shows about 100 occasions when he was scheduled to fly in or out of private air terminals to get to the capital, concerts, dinners, sporting events, political appearances and stays in St. Petersburg and South Florida.

Crist’s office would not reveal who paid for specific flights or answer questions about them, despite the governor’s vow of transparency when he took office. “Our constitution requires that our government be open and transparent,” Crist said in his January 2007 inaugural address. “And under my administration it will be like never before.”

It’s a must-read. The full story here.