• Submitted by: manso
• Society
• 01 / 08 / 2011

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Posted Friday January 7, 2011.MIAMI (Reuters) - The State Department has no information about the whereabouts or status of a leading Cuban government trade expert whom Miami media reports said had fled the island, a U.S. official said on Friday.

Miami's El Nuevo Herald newspaper and several Cuban-American websites reported that Pedro Alvarez, 67, the former head of Cuba's state food importing company Alimport and a key figure in legal Cuban purchases of U.S. farm products over the last decade, had defected to the United States.

In response to questions about the reports, a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said: "We have no information regarding his whereabouts or his status".

The official gave no other details and did not specify if other U.S. agencies might have information about Alvarez.

In Havana, Cuban authorities and state-run media made no mention of the reports from Miami, which said Alvarez had escaped from the Caribbean island in the final days of 2010 and had been under investigation in Havana for alleged corruption.

Alvarez was a well known figure to those U.S. businessmen and politicians who since 2000 promoted U.S. cash sales of agricultural products to Cuba under an authorized exception in the almost five-decades-old trade embargo against the island.

These sales, which Alvarez negotiated for years in his role as Alimport head,reached a record of $710 million in 2008, making the United States Cuba's single largest food provider.

U.S. exports to Cuba include corn, wheat, chicken, soybeans and powdered milk.

But these U.S. farm sales to Cuba have since fallen off sharply as the Cuban government of President Raul Castro cut imports and bought from allies and other countries offering credit and easier terms.

Alvarez, a career official in Cuba's Foreign Trade Ministry left his Alimport position last year to head the Cuban Chamber of Commerce, but was then replaced and put under investigation for alleged corruption, the Miami media reports said.

"Pedro Alvarez was a key figure in the commercial relations established between Cuba and the United States for the sale of U.S. agricultural products authorized by Congress in 2002," Wilfredo Cancio, an analyst of Cuban affairs in Miami, said.

"At the head of Alimport, he set up the Cuban government's strategic platform for this business with U.S. companies to also act as a factor of political pressure against the embargo," Cancio told Reuters. His web site CafeFuerte.com also carried the report of Alvarez' defection.

The original report of Alvarez' flight came from Cuban American journalist and blogger, Oscar Suarez, who said he received the information from a Central American source. Suarez said Alvarez had phoned his mother-in-law from an undisclosed location to say "I'm not going back (to Cuba)".

The same reports said Alvarez' wife, Olga de la Cruz, had been killed in a plane accident in Cuba in November, in which 68 Cubans and foreigners died.

(Reporting by Pascal Fletcher in Miami and Arshad Mohammed in Washington, editing by Anthony Boadle)

Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/120099