US okay's first factory in Cuba since revolution

The Obama administration has approved the first US factory in Cuba in more than half a century, allowing a two-man company from Alabama to build a plant assembling as many as 1,000 small tractors a year for sale to private farmers in Cuba.

The Treasury Department last week notified partners Horace Clemmons and Saul Berenthal that they can legally build tractors and other heavy equipment in a special economic zone started by the Cuban government to attract foreign investment.

Cuban officials already have publicly and enthusiastically endorsed the project. The partners said they expect to be building tractors in Cuba by the first quarter of 2017.

"Everybody wants to go to Cuba to sell something and that's not what we're trying to do. We're looking at the problem and how do we help Cuba solve the problems that they consider are the most important problems for them to solve," Clemmons said. "It's our belief that in the long run we both win if we do things that are beneficial to both countries."

The $5 million to $10 million plant would be the first significant US business investment on Cuban soil since Fidel Castro took power in 1959 and nationalized billions of dollars of US corporate and private property. That confiscation provoked a US embargo on Cuba that prohibited virtually all forms of commerce and fined non-US companies millions of dollars for doing business with the island.

Letting an American tractor company operate inside a Cuban government facility would have been unimaginable before Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro declared on Dec 17, 2014, that they would restore diplomatic relations and move to normalize trade, travel and other aspects of the long-broken bilateral relationship.

Since then, Obama has been carving exceptions into the embargo through a series of executive actions, and his administration now says they allow US manufacturing at the Mariel port and special economic zone about 30 miles west of Havana. One exception allows US companies to export products that benefit private and cooperative farmers in Cuba. Berenthal and Clemmons say they will sell only to the private sector.