John Turley-Ewart
National Post, Toronto, Canada
January 4, 2003

Castro takes Canadians for millions of dollars.

While tourist brochures tout Cuba as a vaca­tion paradise of sandy beaches, the Castro government has refused to pay millions of dollars it owes to Canadian companies and Canadian taxpayers have subsidized further millions in foreign aid that has done little to alleviate the country's desperate poverty.

Denis Paradis, Canada's Secretary of State for Latin America, headed to Havana in early Novem­ber with a message for Fidel Castro, Cuba's communist strongman: "Canadian companies are committed to Cuba ....” He returned to Ottawa saying, "Small and medium-sized Canadian companies have an especially important role to play" in Cuba, and he crowed that he had "promoted Canadian culture and values" throughout his stay.

Perhaps. But what he almost certainly did not do was promote the best interests of the Cuban peo­ple or Canadian business.

While in Cuba, Paradis opened the Canadian Pavil­ion at Havana's 20th annual international trade fair and at the same time, lobbied to counter Cuba's desire to trade more with the United States. Expanded Cuban-U.S. trade is a looming possibility, now that pressure is building within the United States to end the U.S. economic embargo that al­lows only for highly regulated direct food sales to individual Cuban entities, as well as for the sale of medical supplies, all of which must be paid for in cash.

Behind that pressure are such well-funded lobby groups as Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba and the American Farm Bureau. They believe that more trade with Castro will help Cubans and fatten the wallets of U.S. farmers. Last September, both groups were in Washington, arguing for an end to the embargo. A month later, they were in Havana at a large trade fair for U.S. agricultural companies, enviously eyeing the bonanza repre­sented by the US$100-million in annual agricultural products Cuba imports. Many of these companies, along with Castro's government, hope the U.S. treasury, like Canada's, will also open its vaults and extend Cuba the loans it needs to pay for al­most everything it imports.

But if Canada's experience is anything to go by, that hope could be hollow.

January, 1997, was supposed to mark the begin­ning of a new era in Canana-Cuba relations. That is when both countries signed an investment accord that Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's Liberal gov­ernment was promoting as a good thing for both human rights and business. It has proven to be neither.

Taxpayers, along with small and medium-sized businesses in Canada, have been burned by Castro ever since the Prime Minister and ministers such as Paradis started promoting trade with the tropical tyranny.

Mississauga-based Adecon Ship Management, for instance, provides refinancing and administrative services to Cuban shipping companies. The Cuban government currently owes it US$2.2-million, but is ignoring a Canadian federal court order, deliv­ered through proper diplomatic channels, to pay up.

When an Adecon director went to Havana at Cuba's invitation to negotiate a settlement, he was de­tained and his files taken away when he refused to drop his Canadian court case against the Cubans. In a communication marked "confidential," Jennifer Irish, then chargé d'affaires for the Canadian Em­bassy in Havana, said the "official Cuban reaction has been that the documents are 'subversive to the Cuban economy' and are being used as the basis for an investigation...." Yet the documents merely show that Castro's government did in fact owe Adecon money for services rendered. The com­pany's director and papers were released only when the Canadian government intervened. Ade­con is now tracking Cuban ships around the world and impounding them in order to force payment.

Canada's Export Development Corporation has used the same strategy for recovering Cuban loans, using taxpayers' money to provide accounts receivable insurance for Canadian exporters. The EDC had the ship MV Caribbean Queen, owned by Cuba, detained in Casablanca, Morocco, in 2001 before it collected on a debt amounting to ap­proximately $500,000. It had another Cuban ship detained in a French port until the Cuban govern­ment settled out of court. But these are only small victories in a much larger battle for repayment that EDC is losing.

While ministers in the Canadian government have been promoting trade with Cuba, the EDC has been taking the opposite tack. In September, Rod Giles, an EDC spokesman, said Cuba was no longer "an active market" for the agency and it would "not be responsible for us to promote business [in Cuba] considering the current circumstances."

FirstKey Project Technologies, another Canadian firm, would have saved itself a great deal of money had it known in advance about the risks of doing business with Castro. It was one of the first Cana­dian companies to go into Cuba and it lost millions of dollars for its trouble when Castro eventually reneged on deal he had struck with FirstKey over an electrical-power generating project outside Ha­vana.

The Cuban government has not spared small Ca­nadian businesses, either. According to sources familiar with Cuban business practices in Canada, some maritime provision suppliers operating along Canada's East Coast that have sold goods to Cuba's fishing fleet have not been paid and are suffering as a result.

For large Canadian companies that do get paid by the Cubans, such as Sherritt International and companies in the tourism business, a nasty legal surprise may await them down the road. Under Castro's rules, foreign companies employing Cubans must pay hard currency to Cuba, not directly to those they employ. In turn, Castro's bureaucrats pay the workers at going Cuban rates, but in Cu­ban currency, worth a tiny fraction of what Castro puts in his tills. Cuban exiles and others are already counting the days when they can take Cana­dian companies to court and sue them in class­action cases as accomplices in Castro's scheme to rob workers of their rightful wages.

The Canadian taxpayer has also paid a high price for dealing with Castro's communists. In the 2000-­2001 fiscal year, nearly US$22-million of Canadian public money went to cover Canadian exports to Cuba that Castro could not or would not pay for. Canada has also extended what amounts to a US$10-million line of credit to Cuba to help it pay for Canadian agricultural imports. Castro has failed to pay that back as well.

Castro need not stay awake at night worrying about repaying Canadians. He knows our leader­ship's desire to do business with Cuba is more about politics than trade. Thus, it is hardly surpris­ing that, according to some sources, Castro's gov­ernment told Paradis and his officials that if Can­ada wished to counterbalance Cuba's desire to trade more with the United States, Canada had better be prepared to extend Cuba more credit.

Canadian trade and aid to Cuba are part of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's policy of "constructive en­gagement," a soft-power program touted as being a way to facilitate development and a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba. In April, 1998, during an official visit to Cuba, Chrétien launched his policy when he opened the new wing of the José Marti International Airport in Havana, built using Canadian materials and expertise.

Unlike George W. Bush, the U.S. President, and most of his predecessors, who believe there should be no negotiating with Cuba's communist ruler, Mr. Chrétien used his 1998 visit to try to prove other­wise, claiming to espouse the plight of four Cuban human rights activists –Marta Roque, Vladimiro Roca, Felix Bonne and Rene Gomez– unjustly im­prisoned for calling for greater freedom in Cuba. Yet when given a chance to speak freely on Cuban television, Chrétien's concern for human rights quickly evaporated.

Chrétien returned to Ottawa with a photo of him­self standing with Castro and managed to score points with the reflexively anti-American Liberal and intellectual elite at home. The biggest winner, though, was Castro. Because his Soviet subsidies had vanished along with the end of the Cold War, Castro's grip on Cuba's economy now depended upon European and Canadian credit, private in­vestment and, to a very large extent, tourism. Moreover, the communist dictator's economic trials were further eased by Chrétien's promises of more Canadian aid money to prop up his government, more private investment –at the behest of the Canadian government, no less– and a propaganda victory over the United States. Castro told Cubans, who have been hoping in vain for relief from his despotism, that Chrétien's visit demonstrated how isolated the United States is in its opposition to his government.

The fiction of Canada's "constructive engagement" fell apart the following year, in 1999, when the four human rights activists whose cause Chrétien was said to support were sentenced to five years in Castro's Caribbean gulag. Our Prime Minister was reportedly "irked." Meanwhile, most Canadians continued to see Cuba through vacation brochures, with their pleasant villas well out of sight of the poverty across the island.

Castro's flouting of Chrétien's "constructive en­gagement" policy provoked platitudes and little else. Empty threats about no more high-level min­isterial visits between Canada and Cuba, and no more provisions of computer technology for the Cuban justice system, such as it is, were promised –but all turned out to be meaningless. This year, the Canadian International Development Agency has sent Castro's Cuba $8-million, much of it last fall around the time of Paradis's trip to Havana. Since the Liberal government restored Cuba's eli­gibility for aid in 1994, CIDA has sent close to $65­million to Cuba. At the top of Canada's priorities for this money is the "modernization of the [Cubas] state," yet there is no talk of using it to promote "good governance," which is Chrétien's much­trumpeted foreign-aid policy aim for Africa.

In Cuba, people are prevented from exercising the basic freedoms Canadians take for granted. Human Rights Watch, an international organization dedi­cated to fostering respect for human rights around the world, documented Castro's abuses in its de­tailed, 1999 study, Cuba's Repressive Machinery. It concludes that despite signing many treaties, in­cluding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Cuba's legislation falls "far short of compliance with these treaties and in many respects blatantly vio­late their provisions." The message to Canadians from HRW is unequivocal: "Ottawa has little to show for its engagement with Havana and must now use its leverage to push for reforms."

Yet Canada's leverage is mythic rather than real. Little has changed since HRW's 1999 study. Cu­bans continue to live in fear of the regime. Com­mittees for the Defence of the Revolution still op­erate, informing on anyone who loes not conform or who has the temerity to suggest Cuba should be free. Cubans are still jailed for opposing Castro's rule.

Last November, soon after minister Paradis returned to Canada, Raul de la Nuez Ramirez, Cuba's External Trade Minister, arrived in Ottawa. On a sleepy Wednesday afternoon, Ramirez was escorted finto the temple of Canadian democracy, the House of Commons and, on cue, the Speaker recognized him, hailing him as "His Excellency." MPs quickly rose to their feet, some shouting "hear, hear," knowing the visitor was a member of a regime the U.S. administration deplores and Cubans suffer in enforced silence. Ramirez was then afforded an ovation –a testament to Canada's offi­cial response to the oppression of the Cuban people.