US President Trump crackdown may have thrown wrench into U.S.-Cuba food trade

Trump crackdown may have thrown wrench into U.S.-Cuba food trade
By: Marc Frank, Reuters, May 28th 2019

U.S. farmers and agribusiness’s have sold nearly $6 billion in poultry, soy, corn and other products to Cuba since 2001 under an exception to the US trade embargo. This month, however, the Trump administration allowed a long dormant section of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act to take effect as it ratchets up the pressure on Venezuela and Cuba. Title III of the Cuba sanctions law, waived by previous presidents, states that anyone whose property was nationalized after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, even if they were not U.S. citizens at the time, can sue any individual or company profiting from their former holdings. U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure Cuba into dropping its support for Venezuela’s leftist leader, Nicolas Maduro, have added to the island’s existing economic woes and a decline in U.S. food imports could worsen current shortages. The National Bank of Canada facilitates much of the trade in U.S. food, according to U.S. exporters, because there is no banking between the United States and Cuba as a result of the trade embargo. The bank is now concerned that it could be sued if ships unload at ports sitting on nationalized property. According to various western diplomats, lawyers and businessmen, the Cuban government refuses to provide land deeds dating back to before the expropriation of most private property in the 1960s. The government insists these deeds are moot as nationalizations and confiscations that took place after the 1959 Revolution were carried out according to international and Cuban law. The government says compensation was offered to some Cubans and paid to all other countries’ nationals except those of the United States, which instead of negotiating, embargoed the island and tried to overthrow its government.