HAVANA -- (AP) -- An American humanitarian group left Cuba early Wednesday, bound for Mexico and eventually the U.S. border after announcing it would try to import Cuban-made rat poison as a challenge to the U.S. trade embargo.

 The Rev. Lucius Walker and other members of the Pastors for Peace delegation left Havana by plane in the pre-dawn hours, bound for Mexico, the Rev. Raul Sanchez of Cuba's Martin Luther King Center said Wednesday.

 Sanchez said the group was to travel to the Mexican port city of Tampico to pick up the vehicles they used last week in a caravan that carried about 80 tons of
 humanitarian aid from the United States across the Mexican border last week.

 The aid was then transported to Tampico, where it was loaded on a boat and taken across the Gulf of Mexico to Havana.

 Valued at several million dollars, the aid reportedly included medical equipment for cardiology, radiology and anesthesia, mobile bicycle repair stations, medicines, school materials, computers and food.

 After retrieving their vehicles, the group later Wednesday was to drive north across the U.S.-Mexican border, presumably carrying with them the rat poison and other Cuban products Walker mentioned last week.

 Suarez said he did not know where on the border or at what time the caravan was scheduled to cross.

 Walker could not be reached Wednesday because he was traveling.

 But he told reporters last week that ``we are doing a reverse challenge for the first time in history -- taking aid from Cuba by way of our caravan to the people of the United States.''

 The four-decade trade restrictions against Cuba bar most sales of American products to the island, as well as Cuban imports to the United States.

 Walker, founder of the nonprofit Pastors for Peace, at the time said his delegation would likely return home with Cuban solar panels and, most importantly, a rat pesticide called Biorat.

 ``There is a rat problem in the United States in addition to the one in the White House!'' he said.

 The poison, made by biotech firm Labiofam, would be shipped to parts of the United States where ``diseases caused by the burgeoning rat problem create a serious
 health problem,'' Walker said.

 Cuba has commercialized Biorat in Latin America, Africa and Asia since 1994. But it has recently come under fire from U.S. health specialists and two European
 multinationals for allegedly being unsafe, charges rejected by the Cuban company.

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