The Atlantic Monthly | May 2003 by Susan Orlan ..... One thing will never change: Carbonaro must always be on the right. Five years from now, ten years, even twenty, if all goes well, Carbonaro will still be on the right and Primavera on the left, the two of them yoked together, pulling a spindly plough across the loamy fields in the hills outside Cienfuegos. Oxen are like that: absolutely rigid in their habits, intractable once they have learned their ways. Even when a working pair is out of harness and is being led to water or to a fresh spot to graze, the two animals must be aligned just as they are accustomed or they will bolt, or at the very least dig in and refuse to go any farther until order is restored, each ox in its place. Carbonaro and Primavera were not always a pair. Twenty years ago Primavera was matched up and trained with an ox named Cimarrón. They worked side by side for two decades. But Cimarrón was a glutton, and he broke into the feed one day and ate himself sick, dying happy with incurable colic. It was an enormous loss. An ox costs thousands of pesos and must be babied along until the age of two and then requires at least a year of training before he can be put to work. It is especially difficult to lose half of a working pair: you have to find a new partner who fits the temperament and strength of your animal, and above all, you have to find an ox who can work on the now vacant side. Primavera would work only on the left. He could be matched only with a partner who was used to working on the right. It was a lucky thing to find Carbonaro, a right-sider and a pretty good match in terms of size, although to this day he is a little afraid of Primavera and hangs back just a bit. Anyway, it was a lucky thing to find an ox at all. For a while oxen had seemed part of the Cuban landscape—huge, heavy-bodied creatures, with necks rising in a lump of muscle, their gigantic heads tapering into teacup-sized muzzles; homely animals with improbably slim legs and a light tread, their whip-thin tails flicking in a kind of staccato rhythm, the rest of their being unmoving, imperturbable, still. But then cheap Soviet oil came to Cuba, and chemical fertilizers, and, most important, tractors. In fact, during the 1960s and 1970s so many tractors were being sent to Cuba that there were more than the farmers could use. Sometimes when the Agriculture Ministry called the cooperatives to announce the arrival of more tractors, no one even bothered to go to the port to pick them up. During that time hardly anyone wanted oxen. With a heavy tractor a farmer could rip through a field at five or six times the speed he could with a team. It was, or it seemed, so much more modern, and so much simpler, than dealing with the complicated politics of a flesh-and-blood team. Hardly anyone was raising or training oxen. With such a windfall of tractors, no one imagined that oxen would ever again be anything other than a quaint anachronism. Even during the time of abounding tractors Humberto Quesada preferred using Primavera and Cimarrón—and then, of course, Carbonaro—but Humberto is an independent sort of man. His grandfather was brought to Cuba as a slave and was put to work on a sugar plantation of 70,000 rich acres owned by a Massachusetts family. Humberto's father was a slave there too, and Humberto as a child worked beside him in the fields, so that he could learn how to do what he assumed he'd grow up to do. Although the Quesadas were slaves, they were mavericks. Humberto's sister Ramona, a tiny woman with tight curls and a dry laugh, married the son of white farmers down the road—a scandal at the time, but one that yielded a happy fifty-year marriage that became the warm center of the joined families. And of course Humberto went his own way. After the Castro revolution he became a truck driver, but he kept a hand in farming. It was different, because he was farming his own land, a piece of the old plantation. "The land is the foundation of everything," he told me not long ago. "If you have land, you always have something." He was encouraged to join a cooperative, but like many Cuban farmers, he chose to work alone. "There's always a lazy person in a group, so I don't like being part of groups," he explained. Moreover, he resisted each time the government tried to cut back a little bit of his land. Recently the government wanted to build a health clinic on a piece of his property, but once the official in charge of the appropriation realized that the magnificent sweet potatoes he regularly enjoyed were from Humberto's farm, he changed his mind and said Humberto should have more land, not less. Once or twice Humberto rented a tractor, but he didn't like it. "It presses too hard," he explained. "The land ends up flattened, like a Cuban sandwich." Even when everyone else was using tractors, using chemicals, growing only sugar, Humberto ploughed with oxen; fertilized naturally, the way his father had taught him; cultivated tomatoes and corn and lettuce and beans—and sweet potatoes. Humberto never actually owned the oxen. He borrowed them from his neighbor, whose father had fought beside Humberto's father in the War of Independence. When the Soviet money ran out, the battalions of tractors, now out of gas, rattled to a standstill, and oxen—quaint, anachronistic oxen—were once again worth their weight in gold. It was a lucky farmer who had never given them up, who still had a working team, who could still plough and plant even in the worst moments after the Soviet collapse. Luckier still was a farmer who had stuck with such crops as corn and tomatoes rather than being seduced by the money that had seemed as if it would flow forever from sugar. In such a moment a man like Humberto no longer seemed a throwback. Now in his eighties, slightly lame, wizened, Humberto is everything the new Cuban farmer needs to be: small-scale, efficient, diversified, organic—and, most important, invulnerable to the ups and downs of Cuba's gasoline economy, which once depended entirely on Soviet good will and has since come to rest precariously on Venezuelan. Most of the imported oil in Cuba these days comes from Venezuela, and because of the good relationship between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's President, the price had, until recently, been especially favorable. But Chávez was nearly overthrown in April of last year, and when he regained his footing, he suspended the shipments. Across Cuba gasoline prices rose by as much as 20 percent. It was a very good time to have an ox. One recent morning Humberto stopped by to say hello to his sister, who lives with her extended family on another piece of the old plantation property. It was a brilliant, breezy day. Outside Ramona's little cottage a couple of chickens were worrying the dirt, and a litter of piglets were chasing around in a pile of hay. The cottage is tidy, old, and unadorned; there is something timeless about it, as if nothing here, or nearby, had changed in twenty or thirty or fifty years. And, of course, nothing much has changed in the countryside: the elemental facts, the worries over sun and water and whether the seeds have germinated and the eggs have hatched, don't ever change. In Cuba right now there is a sense of the moment, a sense that the country is on the brink of newness and change, a sense that the future is unfurling right now—but the countryside has a constancy, a permanence. And these days Humberto feels like a rich man. He said that everyone he knows is going crazy looking for oxen, and that you have to barter for them or apply to the government, and that anyone who still knows how to train a team—a skill that was of course considered obsolete when the tractors prevailed—is being offered a premium for his talents. He grinned as he said this, pantomiming the frantic gestures of a desperate man looking high and low for a trained ploughing team. Someday, no doubt, the tractors will start up again, and the hills beyond Cienfuegos and the fields outside Havana and the meadows in Camagüey and Trinidad and Santiago de Cuba will be ploughed faster than the fastest team could dream of. Then, once again, oxen won't be golden anymore. They will be relics, curiosities. But this is their moment, just as it is Humberto's moment, when being slow and shrewd and tough is paying off. After we'd talked awhile, Humberto got up and headed down the drive and over to his neighbor's, and a few minutes later he reappeared, leading the two oxen, who were walking side by side. He stopped in the yard near the cottage and brought the animals to a halt and stood beside them, one hand laid lightly on Primavera's neck. The oxen shuffled their feet a little and looked sidelong at the cottage, the chickens, a curtain ruffling in the breeze in Ramona's entryway. Humberto's straw hat was tipped back, and it cast a lacy shadow across his face; he leaned a little against the animal's warm gray shoulder and he smiled.

Minnesota Public Radio News

St. Paul, Minn. — (AP) Lumping Syria into a category of "destabilizing forces" in the Middle East, Sen. Norm Coleman said Tuesday that President Bush has properly demanded that the country stop harboring members of Saddam Hussein's regime or face sanctions.

"And that doesn't mean, by the way, that we go in there and invade militarily. I don't think that's on anybody's mind," the Republican freshman said. "But I think the international community understands that we're serious about dealing with terrorism."

He said the administration's saber rattling simply has put Syria on notice that if members of Saddam's regime are there, Syria should turn them over.

"I think you let them know there are consequences for being a rogue nation and for supporting terrorism. And in the end, I think they'll get the message. ... I don't think there's a grand plan to have the American armies roll across the Middle East," Coleman said.

Despite pressure from Washington, Syrian officials so far have denied that the country has weapons of mass destruction or that it is sheltering Iraqi leaders.

Coleman, however, strongly sided with the White House on the Syrian situation and other foreign policy issues during a swing through the Minnesota Capitol.

"All over the world, it's challenging out there," he said. "I'm not the expert on foreign policy. I have confidence in the president. I have confidence in Colin Powell. I have confidence in Donald Rumsfeld."

That extends to the administration's positions on North Korea and the Palestinian-Israeli situation.

It's crucial, for instance, that the administration has stood by its demand that North Korea accept multilateral discussions over its alleged nuclear weapons program, Coleman said in a wide-ranging interview with several reporters.

Negotiations in 1994 were just between North Korea and the United States. This time, Washington has insisted that Russia, China, Japan and South Korea also be involved.

Russia and China are allies of North Korea and their involvement could help pressure the country into concessions. Japan and South Korea are most at risk by a nuclear-armed North Korea and likely to pay for much of the aid that may be offered with a deal.

Until last weekend, North Korea had insisted on one-on-one talks with the United States, but the stance has softened.

"We tried that before - they lie," Coleman said. "They said in exchange for certain levels of support, they wouldn't develop a nuclear program. They lied. The way you deal with liars is you make you're not sitting around the table alone with them."

Meanwhile, Bush was trying to help broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

"I think what he's got to do now is put more focus, more attention on that issue and work with the international community," Coleman said.

He cited the two preconditions that Bush has outlined: An end to terrorism and the democratization of Palestinian authority.

"I think Yasser Arafat has to go," Coleman said. "And at the same time, Israel has to understand that what it is doing with settlements, there is going to have to be a stepping back."

U.S. officials have said Israel must stop building settlements on the West Bank and Gaza.

After 100 days in office, Coleman could think of no major foreign policy disagreements he had with the president, although he said he would like to see more focus on South America.

"And so I may urge the White House to put more effort into what are we doing in Colombia, what are we doing in Venezuela - we get a lot of our oil from Venezuela," Coleman said. "But foreign policy in the Constitution is the responsibility of the president and I think that's an area where we let him execute. And if we need to kind of urge some refocus on some other things, then we'll do that."

By MIKE BRANOM <a href=www.heraldtribune.com>HeraldTribune.com-Associated Press

Oil prices are in a steep drop thanks to the quick success of coalition forces against the Iraqi regime, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Tuesday, but he added that fallout from last year's turmoil in Venezuela could create a gas crunch this summer. "According to our own agency's outlook that we prepared last week, things look like they're quite a bit better now than they appeared just a few days before that," Abraham said. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude oil futures have dropped almost 25 percent over the past month. Prices topped out at $37.83 a barrel on March 12, a week before the war began. A barrel was selling at $29.02 at noon Tuesday. Such drops were showing up at the pump, as the current average price for a gallon of unleaded gas is $1.60, according to AAA. That's down more than 12 cents since from its peak March 18. "I'm happy to say that for the fourth week in a row, we saw gasoline prices, on a national basis, come down," Abrahams said. However, Abraham added, a two-month general strike in petroleum-rich Venezuela has crimped America's oil supply. Production dropped below 200,000 barrels a day during the walkout, which began in December. "It's meant that our inventories are lower than we'd like them to be," Abraham said. "And when we come into the driving season, particularly after Memorial Day, we could start to see some strain in the marketplace." The Venezuelan government fired 17,000 of the state oil company's 40,000 workers and gradually restarted paralyzed oil refineries. On Sunday, the nation's energy minister said oil production has risen to 3.2 million barrels a day - the highest level since before the strike. Venezuela's production capacity is 3.4 million barrels a day. Gas prices are closely watched in Florida, where a tourism-dependent economy relies on visitors to fly and drive into the state. "When we have a war, when we have an Orange Alert (for homeland security) and we have high gas prices, that devastates our economy on a temporary basis," said U.S. Rep. Ric Keller, R-Orlando, who accompanied Abrahams. "No doubt, our economy will be hurt a little bit in the short term." But Keller added that he thinks people will feel safer traveling and gas prices will drop, because of the success in the war against terrorism and the military's success in Iraq. "I think we'll have a temporary surge, at least with respect to the next couple of weeks, of boosting up our economy," Keller said. Last modified: April 15. 2003 2:49PM

Forbes.com-Reuters, 04.15.03, 2:31 PM ET KINGSTON, Jamaica (Reuters) - Jamaica will launch another search for oil later this year with the help of Venezuela and Ecuador, a government official said Tuesday. Jamaica, which depends heavily on its tourism and bauxite industries, last explored for oil 20 years ago but came up empty. Minister of Technology Phillip Paulwell told reporters in Kingston that proposals for exploration were still being reviewed by the government. "We have received offers of assistance from Ecuador and Venezuela in the form of technical support and guidance and ... the ministry will vigorously pursue exploration efforts using private sector investments," Paulwell said. Exploration will likely be resumed off the Caribbean island's southwest coast, where it is believed there may be major deposits. In 1982-83, a search for oil 50 miles off the southwest coast of the island was unsuccessful. Oil was discovered by another exploration team in the northwestern parish of Westmoreland during the same period, but deposits were not big enough to be commercially viable. Jamaica normally imports 60 per cent of its annual supply from Venezuela and 40 per cent from Mexico. However, a strike in Venezuela this year forced that country to reduce exports and Jamaica turned to Ecuador to fill the gap. Paulwell said imports from Venezuela should be back to normal by June.

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Tuesday, April 15, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Venezuela's Anti-Drugs Czaress, Judge Mildred Camero has come out against a European suggestion to legalize certain kinds of drugs. Speaking at the 46th United Nations (UN) Drugs Commission, Camero says the Andean community is also against legalizing drugs. 

"We are seeing some European countries seeking an easy solution probably because of failure to reduce the demand for drugs ... at the same time, they are demanding that we (producing and transit countries) make a greater effort to eradicate poppy fields ... they have placed norms and demands on us to combat production and traffic."  

It is easy to theorize on decriminalizing drugs, Camero contends, but it is a utopia ... "as a judge I have seen what practical effects drugs have in breaking up the family." 

The Judge says Venezuela has proposed the creation of an international network to exchange information on money-laundering. "In view of the success we have had in creating a national network of money laundering information, we would like to see an international network set up."

Venezuelan Foreign Policy discuss the relative merits of Venezuela's foreign policy and its effects

Our editorial statement reads: VHeadline.com Venezuela is a wholly independent e-publication promoting democracy in its fullest expression and the inalienable  right of all Venezuelans to self-determination and the pursuit of sovereign independence without interference. We seek to shed light on nefarious practices and the corruption which for decades has strangled this South American nation's development and progress. Our declared editorial bias is pro-democracy and pro-Venezuela ... which some may wrongly interpret as anti-American. --  Roy S. Carson, Editor/Publisher  Editor@VHeadline.com