U.S. Medical Expo in Cuba Fuels Hope for Healthy Ties

Outside Havana’s premier exhibition hall, there was a distinct chill in the air Tuesday morning as a group of U.S. free-trade pioneers led by Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles snipped a red-white-and-blue ribbon and quietly made history.

Braving a midwinter cold snap, construction workers were busy erecting a permanent protest site outside the United States’ seafront diplomatic mission here in the Cuban capital.

And the Cuban government was issuing an icy statement that outlined a series of broken promises made to the “valiant grandmothers” of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez as the two women jetted around the U.S. in a bid to bring the boy home. In recent weeks, the stalemated custody battle over the young shipwreck survivor has driven relations between these two old foes to frigid lows.

But in the warmer confines of the Pabexpo Exhibition Center, the doors were opening to the first U.S. trade show in Cuba officially sanctioned by both governments since Fidel Castro’s revolution 41 years ago--a critical first step, many here said, in easing Washington’s oldest economic embargo.

The Cuban leader didn’t attend Tuesday’s opening-day ceremonies for the five-day health exhibition, opting instead to join thousands of uniformed Cuban soldiers and officers in chanting “Free Elian!” in the latest official protest rally at Havana’s Military Technical Institute.

Yet the trade expo, which has brought nearly 300 U.S. exhibitors to Havana, represents a stunning show of corporate America in this Communist-run nation.

The fair includes nearly a dozen California companies and such blue-chip American icons as Kodak, 3M, Hewlett-Packard and Archer-Daniels-Midland. And it climaxes nearly three years of frustration and navigation through mutual mistrust, a dizzying array of embargo regulations and bureaucratic battles in both nations.

“The road all of us have traveled to arrive at this juncture has not been easy,” acknowledged the expo’s organizer, Peter W. Nathan, 66, who in decades past pioneered the first U.S. trade shows in the former Soviet Union and China.

Hector Perez Baez, head of the Cuban Chamber of Commerce, declared that the show demonstrates the “common sense” of U.S. businesses now seeking a foothold in this increasingly open market of nearly 12 million people where Europeans have been doing business for years.

Most company representatives agreed that they hope only to establish corporate beachheads and build relationships this week that will position themselves for a post-embargo future in a market valued at anywhere from $50 million to more than $1 billion annually.

“This is just a first step,” added Waters, who said she personally intervened with President Clinton, a fellow Democrat, a year ago to clear the way for the show.

Yet even Waters conceded that “none of this happens in a vacuum,” proceeding to dedicate the show “to all the children of Cuba and, especially, Elian.”

Waters, a key member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which opposes the U.S. embargo and favors the boy’s return to Cuba, later explained, “I don’t feel it’s possible to be here and talk about opening up possibilities without understanding the connection with Elian and the children here.”

But inside the exhibition hall, where the first of an estimated 8,000 Cuban doctors, nurses, technicians and officials invited to this week’s event were awe-struck by some of the latest advances in U.S. medical technology, there was no trace of Elian’s long shadow.

“It’s so lovely!” Noemi Gorrin, a pediatrician, declared as she toured the maze of lifesaving machinery, medication and other marvels.

Some of the largest crowds gathered around the exhibit of Dublin, Calif.-based Zeiss Humphrey Systems, which offered free glaucoma exams. Pfizer Inc. displayed an array of mood-altering drugs, including the antidepressant Zoloft, beneath the slogan “A pioneer spirit on the borders of medicine.” And G.D. Searle featured its NutraSweet artificial sweetener as a product for diabetics.

“This is like going to another horizon that’s just beginning to open up,” said Samuel Gonzalez, the sales manager of a Searle subsidiary.

“I hope that, through this show, the governments of both the U.S. and Cuba and the population here will see that we are human beings,” he said. “We are not devils. We can live together. I think this will be the beginning of a new interchange between the U.S. and Cuba.”

For Teobaldo Cuervo of the Maryland-based radiotherapy company Nucletron, the expo is “a mission--both personal and professional.”

The Cuban-born medical consultant left Havana in 1961, when he was 18, after his father had “an ideological rift” with guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Cuervo returned for the first time last year to negotiate not only future sales but also the largest single donation of this week’s trade show.

Nucletron will leave its radiation therapy machine, worth $650,000, to Cuba’s National Institute of Oncology and Radiobiology, where it will soon shorten a two-month wait for uterine-cancer therapy.

“I wanted to help,” Cuervo said. “I have cancer. I’m in remission. A lot of things change in your outlook on life. If I can contribute to saving another human life, I’ll do anything I can.”

He acknowledged the allure of Cuba’s health-care market, which “is not a big market, but it’s very advanced.” But he focused on what he called “the idiocy of the embargo.”

“We have opened up the markets in Vietnam, where we fought against them in a war in which many of us Americans died. And we can’t open this market 90 miles from our shores because a few thousand Cubans in Miami are angry?”

U.S. officials have tried to link this week’s show to the Clinton administration’s decisions in the past two years to relax the embargo for food and medicine. But most of the exhibitors said U.S. licensing, reporting and monitoring procedures have continued to make sales here difficult at best.

Against the backdrop of a relationship that has politicized everything from food to the fate of a boy in the four decades since Castro overthrew a corrupt, U.S.-backed regime, organizer Nathan said he hopes the ultimate result of the fair will be greater understanding.

It will be a success, he said, if it eases red tape and expands cooperation “so that neither our government nor Cuba will be able to use any agenda as an excuse.”

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FAMILY REACHES ACCORD

Florida relatives of Elian Gonzalez have agreed to let him meet with his grandmothers. A10