The Cuban government is poised to buy food worth up to $1 billion from the United States over the next year, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson said.
Emerson, returning from a five-day trip to the communist country, said the promise of new food purchases came directly from Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Emerson, R-Cape Girardeau, was one of eight lawmakers who went on the trip.
It was organized by the Lexington Institute, a policy group that advocates lifting the 4-decade-old U.S. trade embargo. The congressional delegation was the largest to visit since Cuba's 1959 revolution.
Emerson and the other lawmakers held a series of meetings with Cuban government officials, including Castro, and they also met with some of the country's leading dissidents.
This was Emerson's third trip to the island nation. Emerson said the goal, as with previous visits, was to promote trade and increase the prospect for a thaw in the icy relationship between the two countries.
"We continued to build relationships and ... a little bit of trust," Emerson said.
Some of Emerson's constituents in Missouri's Bootheel, particularly the rice farmers, have long advocated increased trade with Cuba. And Emerson was a lead proponent of a measure, passed in 2000, that eased the embargo and paved the way - with restrictions - for Cuba to buy American food.
Emerson said Castro raised the prospect of new food purchases during a dinner with the delegation.
"Fidel promised they were planning to buy close to $1 billion of commodities and processed food," she said. "That was very good news."
All the members who went on the trip are part of the Cuba Working Group, organized last year to press for an end to the travel and trade restrictions. The group has 50 members and is split about evenly between Republicans and Democrats.
Their agenda is not shared by the Bush administration, which has pledged to quash any effort to ease sanctions against Cuba until the country implements democratic reforms and ends human-rights abuses.
Despite the White House objections, Emerson said she and others were prepared to press ahead.
Next week, the group plans to introduce legislation to eliminate the travel ban that prohibits Americans from visiting Cuba. The House passed the proposal last year but wasn't taken up by the Senate. .
