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Federal funds never
distributed
What Cuban exile and so-called human rights groups in line for the
federal funds, authorised by the 1996 Helms-Burton Act never
distributed:
- The U.S.-Cuba Business Council, headed by Otto Reich, a former
US ambassador to Venezuela. Reich's group stands to receive
$300,000 to hold conferences on the Cuban economy, prepare Cubans
for setting up small businesses, line up private-sector support
for a democratic Cuba.
- The newly created Institute for Democracy in Cuba, a coalition
of 10 anti-Castro groups, whose leaders include director Rafael
Sanchez-Aballi and Nick Gutierrez, a Miami lawyer who played an
important role in crafting the Helms-Burton property sanctions.
The institute, which hopes to receive $800,000 over two years,
plans to distribute materials to Cuba dissidents and help
disseminate reports by independent journalists.
- $195,000 to the American Center for International Labor
Solidarity, an AFL-CIO organ working with European unions to
persuade firms doing business in Cuba to adhere to codes of
conduct that ensure workers' rights and to prepare emerging labor
leaders on the island.
- $400,000 to the Center for a Free Cuba, which is run by Frank
Calzon and whose board includes former Bacardi Chairman Manuel
Jorge Cutillas, former U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Elena
Diaz-Verson Amos, a Cuban exile millionaire. Calzon, who received
the only grant so far in his former post as Washington
representative of Freedom House, has applied for the new funds to
continue his work, which includes smuggling books, videos,
medicines, typewriters and the like to island dissidents.
Calzon said his group sent more than 30 people to Cuba and
distributed books by George Orwell, Pope John Paul II and
independent Cuban journalists. "I'm very proud of what we did," he
said.
- $110,000 to Ernesto Betancourt, the former director of Radio
Marti, to measure Cuban public opinion by polling travelers and
recent arrivals and conducting telephone interviews.
- $136,000 to the International Foundation of Electoral Systems
to produce an analysis of the technical challenges posed by
holding free elections in a transitional Cuba.
- $85,000 to the SABRE Foundation, a liberal group that seeks to
donate books on medicine, agriculture, business and political
science to Cubans through Catholic Relief Services.
- $120,000 to Cuba Free Press, an organisation that seeks to
promote the work of independent journalists through the Internet
and contacts with U.S. media.
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