TIA Delegation Travels to Cuba to Explore Resumption of Trade
This story appears in the March 28 print edition of Transport Topics.
While President Obama made headlines last week with a historic visit to Cuba, a delegation of U.S. transportation and logistics executives quietly met with Cuban government, academic and business representatives to lay the groundwork for restarting trade with the island nation once the U.S. embargo is lifted.
The private mission to Cuba was set up by the Transportation Intermediaries Association last fall and just happened to overlap with the president’s official visit March 21-22, TIA President Robert Voltmann said last week.
The trip involved executives from 18 member firms and three TIA staffers and, according to Voltmann, it was the first such group to go to Cuba since Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced plans to normalize relations in December 2014.
The TIA group met with port officials in Havana and Mariel, toured a cigar factory and even joined both presidents at an exhibition baseball game. They also received briefings from a university economist and Cuba’s minister of foreign trade and investment and held discussions with officials at the U.S. Embassy and with representatives of ocean carriers that currently provide service to Cuba.
Voltmann, who did not make the trip, said the group was expected to see firsthand the state of transportation infrastructure in Cuba and to assess opportunities for doing business in a country that has, in some respects, not changed since the 1950s. “As U.S. companies begin to invest in Cuba after a nearly 60-year hiatus,” Voltmann said, “the hope is that our members can be directly involved in moving goods.”
Because of poor communication services on the island, Voltmann said he did not expect to hear from participants until they return March. 25. TIA is a trade association that represents freight brokers, forwarders and third-party logistics providers and is based in Alexandria, Virginia.
Robert Fox of JZ Expedited Cos. is one of the participants in the TIA trade mission, according to his son, Zack, an account executive for the Jacksonville, Florida-based firm.
Zack Fox said his father is excited to be a part of the effort to restart U.S.-Cuba trade, in part, because the company’s primary business is hauling cigars through a subsidiary called Florida Tobacco Traders.
“We want to plant the seed down there for the next 10 to 15 years,” Zack told Transport Topics last week. The company’s biggest customer is U.S. Cigar Co., which currently operates in the Dominican Republic.
JZ Expedited started as a freight broker in 2009 and added warehousing and trucking services in 2015.
Another company looking for an opening with Cuba is American Fast Freight Inc. in Fife, Washington. In October, Christopher Paule, AFF’s chief financial officer, met with U.S. chargé d’affaires to Cuba Jeffrey DeLaurentis and Warnel Lores Mora, counselor of the Cuban foreign ministry, to discuss the transfer of goods between the United States and Cuba.
AFF currently serves Puerto Rico and other Caribbean locations. The company expanded its presence in the region with the acquisition of Caribbean Shipping Services in May 2015. CSS specializes in shipping refrigerated goods.
Although it remains unclear when the United States might lift its embargo on trade with Cuba, the Obama administration has taken steps to ease travel and banking restrictions and granted permission for a company in Alabama to open a factory to make small farm tractors for sale in Cuba and for export to other Latin American countries.
The tractor plant would be the first significant U.S. business investment on Cuban soil since Fidel Castro took power in 1959 and nationalized billions of dollars of U.S. corporate and private property.
Voltmann said he believes that by the time Obama’s term in office is over, most restrictions will have been lifted and the embargo will be “meaningless.”
“I’m here to bury the last vestige of the Cold War in the Americas,” Obama said upon his arrival in Havana, “and to forge a new era of understanding to help improve the daily lives of the Cuban people.”
One of the first pronouncements to come out of the president’s trip was a U.S.-Cuban agreement to update maritime navigational charts to facilitate shipping between the nations.
The U.S. Department of Transportation also announced that it has received applications from eight airlines to begin passenger service to Cuba.
That elicited a response from Brandon Fried, executive director of the Airforwarders Association, who urged DOT to reserve the new routes for airlines that have air cargo capabilities.
“The opening of Cuba to travel is about more than just moving people, it will also be about trade,” Fried said. “The eligibility of any airline that ultimately cannot fill planes with both passengers and cargo should be looked upon less favorably.”
