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Oil companies from China and Canada, already prospecting for oil along Cuba's coast, began talks with Cuban energy officials about investments in deep-water operations.
Then, in May, Spain's Repsol-YPF announced it was partnering with India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp., and Norsk Hydro ASA of Norway to explore for oil and gas in six of the 59 deep-water blocks along Cuba's maritime border with the United States. (Sherritt International Corp., the Canadian oil company, has acquired exploration rights in four of the deep-sea blocks.)
That raised the eyebrows of many an oil executive, says Jorge Pinon, a former senior executive with Amoco Oil and a research associate at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.
Norsk and ONGC are among a select group of companies with deep-water know-how and technology, so when they signed on with the Spanish, "everyone else said, 'Maybe we better take a look at Cuba again."'
The U.S. Congress certainly has.
In May, with much fanfare, Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, introduced twin bills to the House and Senate that would exempt Big Oil from the embargo.
Before introducing his legislation, Craig told a reporter that "prohibition on trade with Cuba has accomplished just about zero." Ominously, he added: "China, as we speak, has a drilling rig off the coast of Cuba." (The senator failed to mention that the Chinese are working in shallow water near Cuba's shore, and possess neither the technology nor the expertise to tap Cuba's promising deep-water reserves.)
Regardless, the bills represent the best chance yet to "punch a big hole into the embargo," says Johannes Werner, editor of Cuba Trade & Investment News, published in Sarasota, Fla.
That scenario raises the hackles of the conservative, and highly influential, Cuban-American voting lobby of south Florida -- not exactly what President Bush, or his brother, Jeb, who occupies the governor's mansion in Florida, would prefer three months before midterm elections.
Says Alfredo Mesa, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami: "Those who would advocate for ... allowing U.S. companies to drill off Cuba lose sight of how that would damage our ability to press the Cuban government on other issues, such as human rights."
Environmentalists are also squarely set against oil-industry access to Cuba, though for different reasons. Oil spills -- even routine toxic pollution from drilling -- could pollute the Everglades and Florida's most economically important beaches, they say, and wreck the state's tourism industry.
Thanks to Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Rep. Jim Davis, D-Fla., they, too, have measures in Congress for which to cheer: twin bills that would deny U.S. visas to executives of foreign companies that drill for oil in Cuban waters.
Nelson's bill would undo a 1977 maritime boundary agreement between the countries that bisects the Straits of Florida and allows Cuba to perform commercial activities (e.g., oil drilling) near the Florida Keys.
It's not clear how this could keep the Cubans from exploiting waters closer to their shores than America's. One semiofficial response from Cuba, an editorial by the state-run Prensa Latina newswire, called the measures "extraterritorial."
How likely is it that Congress will act?
"If the oil industry continues to sit on the fence as it has been -- not too likely, especially with this administration and Congress," says Werner, editor of the Cuba trade newsletter. "But there are elections in November, which could change the whole equation."
Peters, of the Lexington Institute, agrees. "I think if you call (oil companies) up and ask them, 'What is your position on this?' they'd say yes, we're behind an exemption in the embargo. But I'm not sure if they would get behind it in a major way yet."
In response to queries from The Associated Press, the American Petroleum Institute in Washington, D.C., the industry's lobbying arm, issued this statement:
"We cannot speak to individual interest in Cuba, but we can say that API members are more focused on expanding ac
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