Editor's note: WND's multi-lingual reporter Toby Westerman specializes in monitoring global shortwave broadcasts and reading foreign-language news journals for information not readily available from the domestic press. Each month, Westerman presents a special in-depth report in WorldNetDaily's monthly magazine, WorldNet. Readers may subscribe to WorldNet through WND's online store.

By I.J. Toby Westerman
© 2000, WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.

A high-level Cuban agricultural delegation this week toured Texas food research, production and processing sites in anticipation of an end to the U.S. embargo on food commodities to the island.

The Cuban visit is in response to an "invitation of agricultural and political groups" who have "on numerous occasions pressured Washington for an end to commercial sanctions against the island," according to official Cuban sources.

As the Cuban group sought to prepare for an increase in U.S. exports, a 14-member Canadian business delegation visited Cuba, seeking to expand Canada's already significant trade volume with the island. According to the Cuban Chamber of Commerce, the Canadians are in Cuba "to explore opportunities in diverse sectors of the Cuban economy." The Canadian business executives "represent the construction, textile, hydraulics, paper, steel, plastics, electronics and communications industries."

The report of Cuba's commercial activity was carried by Radio Habana Cuba, the official broadcasting service of the Cuban government.

According to an earlier report from Radio Habana, Canadian businessmen are part of a "growing number of foreign investors" who "are confident about the increasingly favorable state of the Cuban economy." Canada, along with Italy, Spain, France and Britain, account for 60 percent of Cuba's foreign investment.

Agricultural as well as other commercial interests in the United States are anxious to share in the perceived opportunities in Cuba. Recent estimates of the potential value of agricultural export trade with Cuba have been from $300 million to $1 billion.

The visit of the Cuban agricultural delegation to Texas may also address concerns -- as noted by the Texas Farm Bureau -- that the island may not be ready for a sudden ending to the 40-year embargo.

In April, a delegation representing Texas agricultural interests led by Texas Farm Bureau President Donald Patman and Rep. Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, arrived in Cuba and met with high-ranking Cuban officials concerning trade with the island.

Ironically, this week's business exchanges between Canada, Texas and Cuba coincided with the unveiling in Havana of a bronze statue of the fallen Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in remembrance of the 27th anniversary of the coup that deposed the Chilean leader.

Allende, who is reported to have committed suicide rather than surrender power, was the first elected communist leader in the Western Hemisphere. His socialist policies split the Chilean nation and eventually caused the coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who assumed power after the fall of the Allende government.

The Allende monument joins the Cuban Pantheon of other Marxist heroes, including Ernesto "Che" Guevara and U.S. atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenberg memorial is the only tribute of its kind to the couple, convicted and executed for passing secrets regarding the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

The Cuban government maintains a firm Marxist orientation, and Cuban President Fidel Castro has blamed the free-market economy for world poverty. Referring to Latin America, the Cuban government has denounced "democracy and neo-liberal reforms" for "unparalleled waves of violence and drug trafficking," while "social deterioration and injustice generate discontent and demand changes."

Only two weeks before the Texas agricultural delegation arrived in Havana in April, Castro addressed a summit of underdeveloped nations and called for "an international legal process similar to the Nuremberg trials" for the leaders of "the current economic world order."

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