Veritas, Vol. 37, No. 04, November 1994

              For the Faculty and Staff of the University of Miami	November 1994 Volume 37 Number 4
Summit of the Americas: IIM meetings set the stage for agenda
At the Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires, Ambassador Ambler H. Moss, Jr. (far right) served as a panelist with (from left) the U.S. Ambassador to Argentina James Cheek; Avelino Porto, president of the Universidad de Belgrano; and Raul Granillo Ocampo, Argentine ambassador to the U.S.
Within days of his return from a pre-Summit of the Americas workshop in Buenos Aires, North-South Center Director Ambassador Ambler H.
Moss, Jr., was in Washington, D.C., briefing administration summit planners on their findings. The Buenos Aires meeting was one of three international gatherings organized by the University of Miami North-South Center to identify agenda topics and channel them to summit planners in the executive branch.
The historic Summit of the Americas, less than a month away, will bring to Miami 34 democratically elected leaders from throughout this hemisphere.
Last month the North-South Center hosted three pre-summit workshops in Argentina, Colombia, and Jamaica.
Though nobody has yet created a crystal ball to predict Cuba’s future, the North-South Center now features an information system to make understanding its current situation much easier.
Until now, it was practically impossible to find accurate, updated, and readily accessible data on Cuba. In several weeks, the Cuban Information System, located in the North-South Center, will have its databases on-line. Anyone will be able to access it with a modem and a credit card to cover a small fee.
Two distinct databases will go online: the Granma Newspaper Index and the Comprehensive Cuban Database (CCDB). For now, staff members of the Cuban Information System department are doing the searches themselves for anyone interested.
“The system contains the who’s who’ in Cuba from 1965 to the present,” says Humberto Leon, director of the Cuban Information System and the creator of two databases. “You can find any type of data that you are interested in,” he adds.
The Granma Newspaper Index, which was the first database Leon designed, includes more than 100,000 articles that have appeared in Granma, the Cuban Communist Party’s official newspaper. It contains electronic clippings covering Cuba’s
Each session addressed a major agenda issue for the December 9-11 event. The workshops attracted leading regional experts on economic development, democratic governance, and sustainable development—the three key areas that President Bill Clinton has identified as summit priorities.
“We are in the final phase of summit agenda planning,” says Moss. “Our contribution is being appreciated by official summit planners in Washington and in other capitols of the Americas.”
Moss says after two days of discussions, the participants in the Buenos Aires workshop, “Shared Prosperity: Trade, Investment, and Economic Development,” recommended that
history, economic situation, public health, the ideological evolution, labor issues, education, technology, and international relations, including foreign and domestic policies.
The Comprehensive Cuban Database is even more detailed.
“Suppose you wanted to know everything about a certain Cuban shipping terminal,” adds Leon. “We’ll do a search and give you the size, length, width, and type of each of the cranes, their storage capacity, and whether or not there is railroad access to it. We will even produce a draft of what it looks like.”
According to Leon, the CCDB is the only multidisciplinary database on Cuba in the United States able to outline an organization’s structure and its office-holders for any selected period of time.
“If a researcher needs to analyze what Cuba’s political structure looked like in a specific year, then they can reproduce a political ‘family tree' of all the members of the Politburo, their titles, histories, biographical information, and what their involvements consisted of,” Leon explains.
The most fascinating part of the system, he says, is the ability to specifically pull out any type of information, even the number of beds,
leaders at the summit should agree to create an Economic Community of the Americas. Such an agreement, to be reached by the year 2000, would promote trade liberalization and investment as a means to achieve political, social, and environmental stability.
The Summit of the Americas will be the first gathering of its kind in the United States. “The summit is a momentous occasion for this community. The University has a responsibility to generate debate and provide analysis for summit participants and observers alike,” says President Edward T. Foote II, who along with various UM colleagues has been meeting with business leaders and alumni around the country to discuss summit-related developments.
Other areas of the University are involved in summit-related activities, including the School of Communication, which is sponsoring an event in early December.
James Goodsell, who holds the Knight Chair in Journalism and was a longtime Latin American correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, will host a pre-summit seminar for journalists who, like him, attended the last summit in 1967 in Punta del Este, Uruguay. The veteran journalists will discuss the changes in hemispheric relations and priorities surrounding both meetings.
“We hope to lend a historical perspective to the upcoming summit,” says Goodsell.
—Conchita Ruiz-Topinka
Cuban rafters’ drama shared with students
The pathos of the recent Cuban exodus was brought home to the students of Pearson-Mahoney Residential College, where this raft was on display. Students also had the chance to attend a program featuring four Cuban émigrés who braved the journey, along with the president of Brothers to the Rescue, who patrol with low-flying planes the Florida straits for survivors. Brothers to the Rescue supplied this raft.
North-South Center features current Cuban data on-line
continued on page 4
Jorge A. Todero