HAVANA (AP) -- Ending the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba would
                  benefit Americans as much as it would benefit Cubans, Illinois Gov. George
                  Ryan said Tuesday during a visit to the communist island.

                  He said eliminating the trade sanctions would give Americans access to a
                  Cuban medical advancement that could save lives.

                  "Yesterday we learned that they have a meningitis vaccine here," said Ryan,
                  a first-term Republican. "We have people dying in the United States from
                  meningitis."

                  "We can be helpful to the Cuban people and they can be helpful to us," he
                  said during a tour of an agricultural cooperative outside Havana.

                  The Clinton administration recently agreed to let a drug company with U.S.
                  offices -- SmithKline Beecham -- work with Cuban researchers on tests of a
                  vaccine against meningitis B for possible use in the United States. Meningitis
                  is a potentially deadly infection of the fluid that envelopes the brain and spinal
                  cord.

                  The Cuban government has depicted Ryan's five-day trip -- the first by an
                  U.S. governor since the 1959 revolution -- as a reflection of growing U.S.
                  opposition to the trade embargo. Cuban officials have increasingly reached
                  out to American officials who have no connection to Miami or Washington
                  -- the two places in the United States where resistance to ending the
                  sanctions is strongest.

                  But the governor has made clear that his support for ending the embargo
                  does not signify support for the communist government. Ryan held a meeting
                  Tuesday with some of the island's best-known dissidents at the residence of
                  new U.S. Interests Section mission chief Vicky Huddleston.

                  The Cuban government has placed much importance on the visit, loaning
                  some of President Fidel Castro's top security men -- and even an ambulance
                  -- on a tour of rural Havana province on Tuesday.

                  Ryan said Tuesday that he had not yet met with Castro but would be happy
                  to talk with him. Such a meeting was considered likely before the governor's
                  departure for home at about noon Wednesday.

                  In the morning, the governor toured the Heroes of Yaguajay farm
                  cooperative, where he walked through vegetable fields and sampled coconut
                  milk and the tropical fruit guava.

                  Later, the black government Mercedes Benz loaned for Ryan's visit led a
                  convoy of minibuses, security vehicles and press cars past miles of sugar
                  cane fields to a dairy. Ryan strolled past rows of large black-and-white
                  Jersey cows, accompanied by Agriculture Minister Alfredo Jordan Morales.

                  Ryan said all he had seen and heard during his visit only convinced him
                  further of the need to eliminate the embargo, imposed in 1962 to punish
                  Castro's government.

                  But the sanctions have strong support in the United States from a politically
                  influential portion of Miami's Cuban exile community. Some
                  Cuban-Americans criticized Ryan for visiting the island.

                  The trip initially was described as a trade mission, but was later
                  characterized as a humanitarian trip aimed at increasing contacts between
                  Americans and Cubans.

                  The Illinois delegation, which includes Illinois state lawmakers and
                  representatives of agricultural and pharmaceutical firms, delivered more than
                  $1 million in humanitarian aid during the trip.

                    Copyright 1999 The Associated Press.