Trying Poison on Embargo of Cuba
Caribbean: Pastor visiting the island nation hopes to bring back Biorat,
a product to
kill rodents, for U.S. inner cities.
By MARK FINEMAN, Times Staff Writer
HAVANA--Firebrand Brooklyn pastor the Rev. Lucius Walker Jr. arrived here
Wednesday with 80 tons of unlicensed humanitarian aid from the United States
in tow.
But it's what the activist plans to bring home next week that will pose
a unique challenge
to the American economic embargo of the Communist-run island: rat poison.
Walker plans to return with cases of a product called Biorat for distribution
to
community groups in inner cities, his first attempt to break the blockade
by bringing a
Cuban product to the U.S.
Biorat combines a healthy dose of salmonella, some phage and a dash of
lysine
negative into a meal of biological components that its advocates claim
can kill the entire
rat population of a city while causing no harm to the human inhabitants.
Cuban scientists and their state-owned Labiofam company say they have used
the
recipe for nearly a decade to decimate the rat populations in aging Havana
and in
nations as far off as Vietnam, Uganda and Mongolia.
But the four-decade U.S. embargo of Cuba has barred the biological
rodenticide--and virtually all other Cuban products--from U.S. markets.
Walker, whose Pastors for Peace group has sponsored a dozen aid caravans
that
have delivered more than 2,000 tons of aid here since 1992, calls his first
attempt to
import a Cuban product into the U.S. "reciprocal solidarity."
"We're doing a reverse challenge for the first time in history, taking
aid from Cuba
through this caravan to the United States," said Walker, who also plans
to bring back
Cuban-made solar panels. "The blockade is a double-edged sword. It hurts
the people
of Cuba and it hurts the people of the United States."
When he returns with the Cuban products, Walker said, "that may be an occasion
when the Bush administration may show its true colors."
Walker and his New York-based Interreligious Foundation for Community
Organization have made bridging the gap between the U.S. and Cuba a crusade.
They
have sponsored American students studying at a Havana medical university
and other
joint projects, incurring the wrath of Miami-based anti-Castro Cuban Americans.
As in previous visits, Walker will use his presence here to condemn the
embargo
that he and his supporters in the Black Congressional Caucus have called
"immoral" and
"a harsh and inhumane policy." But this visit by a delegation of about
90 religious
leaders, scholars, medical students and others, who will tour Labiofam's
factory here
today, highlights a Cuban industry little-known across the ideological
divide between the
island and the vast American consumer market 90 miles away.
Biorat is just one of hundreds of cutting edge biological and genetic products
developed by Cuban scientists and marketed by state-owned companies for
whom
necessity clearly has been the mother of inventions.
Short on money but long on highly educated researchers and scientists,
President
Fidel Castro's government invested heavily in several high-profile research
institutes that
have produced vaccines against meningitis and hepatitis. They've also discovered
natural interferon, created recombinant drugs and genetically altered tilapia
fish that
grow months faster than natural ones, and are carrying out advanced human
trials of an
AIDS vaccine that Cuban officials say holds promise.
For cash-strapped Cuba, which lost billions of dollars in aid with the
1991 collapse
of the Soviet Union, all this is for sale.
Beginning in the early 1990s, the government created companies such as
Labiofam,
a Spanish acronym for Biological Pharmaceutical Laboratories, as profit
centers to
market scientific breakthroughs abroad and earn vital foreign exchange
to pay Cuba's
foreign debts.
Among the most successful products is a rare vaccine against group B meningitis
that
has proved so effective that U.S.-based SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals
spent
more than a year negotiating with the U.S. Treasury Department for a license
to test and
ultimately import the drug. No such vaccine exists in the United States,
and in 1999 the
U.S. government granted an exception to the embargo and approved the license.
The market for Biorat and other Labiofam products should be equally promising,
according to the company's scientists and salespeople and Walker's "solidarity"
partners
here.
Already, Labiofam has signed joint-venture agreements for factories to
produce the
rat killer in Vietnam and Uganda. The company is in the final stages of
joint tests in
Brazil of an insecticide that targets the mosquitoes that carry dengue
fever and malaria.
And it has a whole line of biodegradable soaps, shampoos and skin-care
products.
Labiofam contributes more than $6 million a year to the Cuban economy,
company
officials say.
Officials connected with Walker's visit are glowing in their praise of
Biorat.
"For American cities with rat infestations, Biorat is certainly something
unique--something they can use to improve health and quality of life,"
said Jose Estevez,
who heads the North American department of the Cuban Institute of Friendship
with
the People, the group sponsoring Walker's delegation.
"I'm not a technician or a scientist, but I understand that this product
has absolutely
no secondary effects on other animals, on the environment or on humans,"
he said. "It
contains a strain of salmonella that only affects rats. In Europe, some
technicians
actually ate some Biorat to show it has no effects."
U.S. officials, however, are skeptical.
Although Washington has made no official comment on Walker's import plans,
an
official who asked not to be named noted that the product has yet to be
tested in the
United States, where the standards tend to be a bit more stringent than
in Hanoi or
Havana.