• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

The Messenger-Inquirer Keith Lawrence Perspective Column

Posted on: Monday, 1 August 2005, 15:00 CDT

Jul. 31--News out of Washington last week said President Bush was spending considerable time twisting congressional arms, working to win passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

That's like NAFTA, only it exports our jobs farther south.

But I'm not going to get into that.

"Trade creates jobs and lifts people out of poverty," The Associated Press reported House Speaker Dennis Hastert saying at a news conference with Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.

"And there's nothing like a stable society to fight terrorism and strengthen democracy, freedom and rule of law," he said.

OK, if CAFTA is so good, why does it exclude Cuba?

If it fights terrorism, why aren't we worried about a country 90 miles from Florida?

Oh, I know why.

Because Cuban exiles are an important voting bloc in Florida.

And let's see, who's governor of Florida?

And what state decided a recent presidential election?

But why, in a world of logic and reason rather than politics, do we still refuse to trade with Cuba?

Two years ago, Tim Lynch and Necati Aydin of the Center for Economic Forecasting and Analysis at Florida State University wrote that before 1959, the United States was Cuba's main trading partner, and 85 percent of Cuba's exports went through the United States.

Then, Fidel Castro seized power -- and American assets in Cuba.

He was a communist, and we didn't do business with communists.

Yeah. Right.

We've done business with every other dictator in the world -- no matter how brutal or dangerous.

But we still don't want to trade with Cuba.

The Lynch-Aydin reports says Cuba needs to spend $500 million on telecommunications, $500 million on mass transit, $575 million on airports and $540 million on railroads.

Somebody's gonna get that business.

The report says that our Cuban embargo costs the U.S. economy between $3 billion and $4 billion a year in lost exports.

Lifting sanctions, the authors say, would create 31,262 jobs in the United States.

Trade with Cuba, they say, could grow to between $5 billion and $15 billion over 10 years.

What's that mean to us?

In 2002, John Wright, vice president for strategic planning and development at Owensboro Grain Co., visited Cuba and came home excited.

"Cuba would be a strategic market for Owensboro," he said at the time. "The river here is ice-free 12 months of the year. And it's only an eight- to 10-day trip to the Gulf of Mexico."

Cuba, a nation of 11.1 million people, would be a $700 million-a-year market for America's farmers, said advocates of lifting the embargo imposed by President Kennedy on Feb. 7, 1962.

If NAFTA and CAFTA make sense, then why not a Cuba Free Trade Agreement as well?

-----

To see more of the Messenger-Inquirer, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.messenger-inquirer.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: Messenger-Inquirer

More News in this Category