Word: cubans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Despite their poverty, Cubans are eager to buy from the U.S. To the extent Castro allows, they are trying out capitalism, creating new private businesses, from boarding houses to pizza-delivery services, primed by the annual $800 million that family members in the U.S. send them. Many even draw dollars from Havana ATM machines, via accounts set up by U.S. relatives in Canada and Europe. But for Cubans, entrepreneurship is fraught with migraines, from exorbitant government licenses and taxes to graft. And for those who have no access to dollars, despair--and resentment--is rising. At the same time, Cubans...
Still, it's too early to count out the embargo's tenacious Cuban-American lobby. Its chief muscle is in the House, where efforts similar to Ashcroft's have been killed this year. "Trading with the most anti-American dictator in the world is a cheap, cynical manipulation of farmers' emotions," said Jorge Mas, head of the Cuban-American National Foundation in Miami. Besides powerful Republican Senator Jesse Helms--who tightened the embargo in 1996 after Castro's air force shot down two small U.S. civilian planes near Havana--Mas has two other key allies: presidential contenders George W. Bush...
...Canadian and European executives warn that the island is an emerging market the way molasses is a river: the socialist bureaucracy is maddening; the military, headed by Castro's brother Raul, plays an inordinate role in business affairs; and some 85% of the wages that foreign companies pay impoverished Cuban workers (who make an average $15 a month) ends up in government coffers. Cuba's post-Soviet economy has made a comeback since it crashed in 1993, but the country has garnered less than $3 billion in foreign investment in the '90s--largely because Castro remains ideologically opposed to opening...
...like the Cuban-American anti-Castro lobby to spoon-feed the aging strongman a propaganda victory, but then things haven't been going their way for some time now. The anti-Castro camp is fighting to keep Elian Gonzalez, who turned six Monday, from being reunited with his father in Cuba, after his mother and stepfather died when their vessel went down on the journey from Cuba. Elian, who was found clinging to an inner tube, was placed with relatives in Florida, and anti-Castro activists have showered him with toys and urged that he be allowed to stay...
...Both sides are using this as a propaganda strategy, and the only one who really loses out is Elian," says TIME Miami bureau chief Tim Padgett. "The Cuban-American community in Miami is holding the boy up as an anti-Castro cherub to keep the heat up on their political agenda and put pressure on Washington not to return the boy to his father, while the Cuban government is turning the issue into an epic Cold War crusade when all they really have to do is let the father travel to Miami and let any family court judge release Elian...