From Heartland to Havana

Minnesota Democrats Rep. Collin Peterson and Sen. Amy Klobuchar might seem like odd candidates to jump into the muddy waters of U.S.-Cuba relations. Yet together, they’ve authored a pair of bills that would lift a decades-old travel ban to Cuba and poke holes in the U.S. trade embargo of that island nation.

But Peterson has made clear that this effort isn’t about Cuba; it’s about American farmers needing new markets. Peterson is the current chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, and his 7th district covers a heavily agricultural swath of the state. OpenSecret.org’s list of his top campaign contributors also reads like a who’s-who of national and international agribusiness interests, with the multinational agricultural corporation, Monsanto, topping the bill.

Steve Suppan, a policy analyst for the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, said in an e-mail that agribusiness giants like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland have “long sought” exemptions from the Cuban embargo, which would eliminate the need for them to trade through third-country loopholes as they currently do. He argues this exemption, which would primarily move commodities whose production is “highly mechanized,” is hardly the pro-farmer job-creation engine its authors suggest.

There are in fact excellent reasons — economic, cultural and otherwise — to open relations with an apparently reforming Cuba, which has been singled out as a communist pariah for too long. It is time to re-evaluate our gratuitous, Cold-War-era posture toward this close neighbor. To that end, lifting the travel ban is of undeniable importance, but this narrow proposal that comes from Minnesota’s congress-people reeking of special interests falls short of a productive solution.