San Diego Union Tribune: Must Uncle Sam be so ham-handed with Cuba?

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UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

Arrogant America

Must Uncle Sam be so ham-handed with Cuba?

February 13, 2006

The first rule in U.S.-Latin American relations is also the first rule of medicine: “First do no harm.”

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The latest brouhaha involves Cuban businessmen, Texas oilmen, the Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City and the equivalent of an eviction notice. It all started a couple of weeks ago when officials with the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed that they had asked Starwood Hotels – which owns the Sheraton Maria Isabel in Mexico City – to expel from the hotel a group of Cuban businessmen who had flown in from Havana to meet with the American oilmen in the hopes of striking a deal to drill for oil off the Cuban coast. According to experts, Cuba may have enough oil to produce as much as 700,000 barrels a day.

Apparently, meetings between Cuban officials and American business executives, are not uncommon. One of the organizers of the meeting at the Sheraton claims that this was the 10th such meeting he'd helped organize – though the first to deal with oil.

However, this particular meeting was short-circuited by the Bush administration, which has been taking an especially hard line against Cuba in recent months. A spokesman for the Treasury Department explained that the hotel, as an American corporate subsidiary, is thus – under U.S. law – “prohibited from providing a service to Cuba or Cuban nationals.” The law in question is the ominously entitled “Trading with the Enemy Act and the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992,” which bars U.S. companies or their overseas subsidiaries from providing services to Cuban individuals or companies.

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And, of course, we're also concerned that clumsy missteps like this only feed the perception south of the border that the United States doesn't know when to mind its own business. The very idea of any government telling a private company operating in a sovereign country that it can't provide a service to the citizens of another sovereign country is the height of arrogance.

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