First shipment of brand-name American food arrives in Cuba
Mon Aug 19,10:25 AM ET

HAVANA - The first brand-name American food sold directly to Cuba in more than
four decades arrived on the island this weekend - a 132-ton shipment of butter,
margarine and cereals.

The load, which arrived Sunday, is the first half of a dlrs
750,000 order Cuba placed with Marsh Supermarkets
Inc. of Indianapolis for its Marsh brand products. The
second half of the order is expected to arrive later this month.

With the shipment, Cuba now has purchased about 770,000 tons of American food
worth about dlrs 125 million since the communist government started taking
advantage of a U.S. law easing the 40-year-old American trade embargo to allow
direct food sales.

The new shipment was the first of packaged goods bearing a brand name -
Marsh's. Past deliveries have been of bulk commodities, including apples, onions,
corn, rice, wheat, soy, poultry, vegetable oil, eggs and pork lard.

Cuba could buy as much as 70 percent of all its imported food from the United
States if it could get financing for the deals, said Pedro Alvarez, the head of Cuba's
import food agency Alimport. Currently, it must pay cash for U.S. food.

Cuba annually imports about dlrs 1 billion in food, mostly from Europe, Asia and
Latin America, Alvarez said.

U.S. lawmakers from farm states are pushing to end a ban on American financing of
the sales to make it easier to sell to Cuba.

But President George W. Bush has said he will veto any more
efforts to ease existing sanctions until Cuba undertakes economic and political
reform.