Le Misanthrope

viernes, 2 de abril de 2010

Cuba Readies for U.S. Tourists With Luxury Hotels

By Jonathan J. Levin

March 26 (Bloomberg) -- Cuba’s hotels could manage a sudden influx of 1 million American tourists if the U.S. Congress lifts its 47-year ban on travel to the Communist island, Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero said.

Additionally, the Caribbean nation is set to expand its capacity of about 50,000 rooms, with groundbreaking scheduled for at least nine hotels in 2010, Marrero said. About 200,000 rooms may be added in the “medium to long-term,” he said. Cuba is also seeking investment partners for 10 golf courses and luxury hotels aimed at Americans, according to a ministry official.

“I’m convinced that today, with the available capacity, we could be receiving the American tourists without any problem,” Marrero said in an interview yesterday in Cancun, Mexico where he was attending a conference of 40 American and Cuban tourist industry representatives.

The tourism industry meeting comes as the U.S. Congress considers a law that would lift the ban on travel to Cuba. Senator Byron Dorgan, one of 38 co-sponsors of the bill, said he has 60 votes lined up to win passage of the measure this summer. Similar legislation introduced in the House has 178 co-sponsors and needs 218 votes to pass if all 435 members vote.

“This is a 50 year-old failed policy,” Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, told the meeting yesterday in a phone call from Washington. “Punishing Americans by restricting their right to travel just makes no sense at all.”

‘New Era’

President Barack Obama said March 24 that he’s seeking a “new era” in relations with Cuba even as he denounced “deeply disturbing” human rights violations by its government. He did not say where he stands on lifting the travel ban.

Obama last year ended restrictions on Cuban-Americans traveling to Cuba and transferring money to relatives back home. The U.S. State Department has also held talks in Havana with Cuban officials about restoring mail service and cooperation on migration issues.

Tourism to Cuba increased 3.5 percent amid the global financial crisis to 2.4 million visitors last year, with 900,000 visitors from Canada leading the way, Jose Manuel Bisbe, commercial director for the Tourism Ministry, said in an interview this week in Havana.

Bisbe expects foreign arrivals to grow by a similar amount this year. If the U.S. travel ban is lifted, hotels won’t be overburdened because Americans will visit year-round and face capacity problems only during the winter high season when occupancy reaches 85 percent, he said.

‘Forbidden City’

“Havana has been the forbidden city for so long that it will be a boom destination even in the low season,” said Bisbe, who estimates Cuba will add another 10,000 hotel rooms in the next two or three years.

Daniel Garcia, who has sold tourists used books in Old Havana since 1994, said more Americans would be good for business.

“The gringos can’t help but spend their money,” Garcia, 43, said at his stand in front of the neo-classical building that housed the U.S. Embassy before Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution. “They are the easiest tourists to sell to. They never ask for discounts.”

Marrero said the government can’t finance development of tourist infrastructure on its own so it’s scouting for foreign partners such as Majorca, Spain-based Sol Melia SA, which already manages 24 hotels on the Communist island.

“The Cubans have provided us with a fairly complete picture of their tourism product and future opportunities for U.S. businesses to work in this market,” Lisa Simon, president of the Lexington, Kentucky-based National Tour Association, said in an e-mailed statement. “We look forward to a follow up conference next year in Cuba, should the legislation pending in Congress be approved.”

U.S. House May Pass Cuba Farm Export Bill in April

By Jonathan J. Levin

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. House of Representatives may pass a bill next month that would ease restrictions on agricultural exports to Cuba and lift a ban on travel to the Communist island, the measure’s sponsor said.

Congressman Collin Peterson, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said he needs backing from one more lawmaker to assure the panel will approve the legislation. He expects to secure that pledge after Congress’s Easter recess, and for the measure to then get approval by the full House.

“Cuba used to be one of our big markets,” Peterson, a Minnesota Democrat, said in a telephone interview yesterday. The bill “would help us get those markets back.”

The U.S. International Trade Commission estimates the U.S. could supply as much as two-thirds of Cuba’s agricultural imports, up from the current 30 percent, if restrictions are eased, Peterson said in a committee hearing this month. The bill would end a requirement that payments from Cuba to U.S. farmers go through a bank located in a third country and be made all in cash, steps that make trade more difficult.

The U.S. exported $528.5 million in food and agricultural products to Cuba in 2009, according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council.

Peterson’s bill, known as the “Travel Restriction Reform and Export Enhancement Act,” is the latest House legislation seeking to end a 47-year prohibition on Americans traveling to Cuba. The “Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act,” sponsored by William Delahunt, Democrat from Massachusetts, would ease travel restrictions without changing rules about agricultural exports.

Versions of both bills are under consideration in the Senate.

Travel Ban

“I don’t think we’ll be able to get the agriculture changes by themselves,” Peterson said. “There’s a lot of support for lifting the travel ban, and if you put that together with the agriculture, I think we have enough votes to get it through the House.”

Proposals to end travel restrictions to Cuba may lack the support needed to pass as a stand-alone bill in the Senate, said Senator Byron Dorgan, who introduced the Senate version of the “Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act.”

Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota, said he will seek to move the legislation by attaching it as an amendment to another bill more likely to get the 60 votes needed block a filibuster, he said today in a telephone interview from Bismarck, North Dakota.

‘New Era’

President Barack Obama said March 24 that he’s seeking a “new era” in relations with Cuba even as he denounced “deeply disturbing” human rights violations by its government. Obama hasn’t told congressional Democrats where he stands on ending the travel ban, according to Peterson.

Obama last year eased restrictions on Cuban-Americans traveling to Cuba and transferring money to relatives on the island. The U.S. State Department has also held talks in Havana with Cuban officials about restoring mail service and cooperation on migration issues.

The island nation can handle an influx of American tourists if the bill is passed, Cuba’s Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero said in a March 25 interview in Cancun, Mexico. He said the local tourism industry is preparing, with at least 9 hotels scheduled to break ground by the end of this year.

Tourism to Cuba increased 3.5 percent last year to 2.4 million visitors, with 900,000 travelers from Canada leading the way, Jose Manuel Bisbe, commercial director for the Tourism Ministry, said in an interview last week in Havana.

American’s Arrest

Cuban Tourism Ministry officials were in Cancun last week to meet with U.S. tourism industry professionals.

Dorgan said the arrest of American Alan Gross last December in Havana may be an impediment to lifting the travel ban, and called on Cuban officials to free the prisoner.

Gross, a U.S. State Department contractor, is accused of working as a spy after he distributed cellular phones and computers to Jewish groups on the island to help them communicate with friends and relatives outside Cuba. Gross’s wife, Judy Gross, said her husband had done “nothing wrong,” according to a video statement reproduced on CNN’s Web site.

“Over the years, as we get close to achieving something, the Cubans have a way of poking Americans in the eye,” Dorgan said.

domingo, 10 de enero de 2010

Texas slaying believed tied to ICE informants

William Booth, The Washington Post

844 words

28 August 2009

The Boston Globe

EL PASO - Jose Daniel Gonzalez was living the sweet life in America. He bought the $365,000 two-story Mediterranean with the tile roof and swimming pool. He started a trucking company, and was raising a family. But on a Friday night in May, he was executed in his front yard - eight shots, tight pattern, close range.

According to police detectives, Gonzalez knew the man who ordered his killing. He also knew the man who stood on his lawn and watched him die. These things are often personal, especially among high- level drug traffickers.

A gangland-style slaying is no big news across the river in Ciudad Juarez, the bloodiest city in Mexico, where more than 1,300 people have been killed in 2009, and only a handful of cases have been solved, despite the presence of 10,000 soldiers and federal police officers in President Felipe Calderon's war on drug cartels.

But in El Paso, where local leaders boast how safe their city is and the 12 homicides this year have almost all been solved, the Gonzalez killing was as disturbing as it was sensational. For people here, the blood splashed on a pretty American street was a jarring sign that Mexico's drug violence is spilling across the border into US suburbia.

Most unsettling for many, especially El Paso police officials, was that both Gonzalez and the man accused of ordering his killing turned out to be ranking drug traffickers from the notorious Juarez cartel, as well as informers for the US government.

"So this is how these people end up in our country," said El Paso police Lieutenant Alfred Lowe, the lead homicide detective and 29- year veteran whose team made the arrests in the Gonzalez case. "We bring them here."

As a spectacular wave of drug violence washes over Mexico, the Obama administration, the US Congress, and leaders in Southwestern states are spending billions of dollars and massing thousands of agents to keep the chaos from crossing the border. But to fight the drug traffickers, federal antinarcotics agents have brought Mexican cartel members north of the border, to use them to gather intelligence and to build cases.

That has led to friction between US law enforcement agencies. In meetings with federal counterparts, El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen, who lives close to the Gonzalez home and heard the shots the night of the slaying, said he has complained about a lack of cooperation and information-sharing. Allen told reporters he raised those complaints in meetings with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, which, according to police and court documents, arranged for Gonzalez's visa to live in the United States.

Lowe said ICE agents were uncooperative during the investigation, misleading El Paso officers by failing to provide accurate names, photographs of suspects, and timely intelligence that might have helped solve the homicide more quickly.

"We've never worked well with ICE," Lowe said.

ICE officials declined to comment on the specifics of the Gonzalez case or on the conduct and cooperation of their agents. "As a matter of policy, we don't confirm or deny confidential sources or sources of information," said Richard Rocha, spokesman for ICE in Washington. "All allegations of misconduct are taken seriously and if reported will be fully reviewed."

As the investigation into the Gonzalez killing progressed this summer, police said they were further surprised to learn that the man charged with orchestrating the slaying was a fellow drug cartel member, a specialist in assassination - and a federal informant for ICE living in El Paso.

Ruben Rodriguez Dorado, a Mexican citizen, was detained this month and charged with murder in the Gonzalez case. Before he was a suspect, police detectives said, they were introduced to Rodriguez by ICE agents, who presented him as an informant who might be able to help on the case.

When he met with El Paso police, who said they were not given his name, Rodriguez bragged that he was "the main man in El Paso" for the Juarez cartel. Detectives said they later learned that his specialty was arranging hits for hire. "He told us that he was high in the food chain and that he'd ask around and see what he could find and that he would let us know. Of course, he didn't let us know anything," Lowe said.

El Paso police arrested three American teenagers they said Rodriguez recruited to his crew: US Army Private First Class Michael Jackson Apodaca, 18, who allegedly pulled the trigger, and Chris Duran, 17, who drove the getaway car, according to the court papers. Both were charged as adults with murder, along with a 16-year-old who police said did surveillance for the gang. His name is being withheld.

Caption: El Paso's lights are visible across the border wall in Juarez, Mexico, where more than 1,300 people have been killed this year. Sarah L. Voisin/the Washington post