Coffee for...
Reproducimos la carta enviada por "Joseito". Aunque Carta de Cuba está consciente de que existen diversas opiniones sobre el embargo norteamericano a Cuba y sobre quienes realmente se benefician del mismo, es claro que un producto de este tipo es una falta de respeto a todas las victimas del castrismo y a la comunidad cubana exilada en los EEUU. ¿Se imaginan la reacción en los EEUU si se vendiera un café con la cara de Hitler y aplaudiendo sus acciones? Dejamos a los lectores el acatar o no la sugerencia planteada por el autor de la carta sobre que decirle a estos tontos útiles.
De aquí en adelante es lo que recibimos:
The
picture on the coffee package is Che and Fidel Castro hugging Pope John Paul II
. Information
on the company that produces this TERRIBLE product is listed below.
We haven't found the stores that sell the coffee yet but here is the information
on the producer. CALL THIS JERK !!!! and TELL HIM WHATEVER YOU WANT
!!!
Wholesale
(800) 462-1999 or (707) 964-0118 - Mail Order (800) 648-6491
©1999-2002 Thanksgiving Coffee Company, All rights reserved. P.O. Box 1918,
FORT BRAGG, CALIFORNIA 95437 their website is: www.thanksgivingcoffee.com
article
taken from website: www.teaandcoffee.net/1002/special.htm
Coffee
With
A Cause
BY
LARRY LUXNER
Veteran coffee roaster
thinks the 40-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba is illogical, impractical
and immoral. That's why Katzeff, c.e.o. of Thanksgiving Coffee Co. in Fort
Bragg, California, recently launched a new line of beans called "End
the Embargo Coffee." The brand, which retails in selected U.S.
specialty shops for roughly $9 per 12-oz. package, brazenly features a picture
of revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara in his trademark beret, along
with a photo of Fidel Castro embracing Pope John Paul II and six paragraphs of
text explaining why the embargo is morally bankrupt. Yet for all his idealism,
Katzeff isn't stupid. The 64-year-old New York native, whose company made a name
for itself in the 1980s by circumventing the U.S. embargo on Nicaraguan coffee,
says he has no intention of violating the law by attempting to import Cuban
coffee beans. As a result, the coffee inside bags of "End the Embargo
Coffee" actually comes from Nicaragua, Mexico and Guatemala, countries that
"have also endured the effects of unjust U.S. economic policies."
"My purpose is not to risk everything I've worked for over 30 years. That
would be absurd," Katzeff said. "The point is that someday, there will
be Cuban coffee in that package." So what's the difference between defying
U.S. law during the Reagan years and defying it today? "When I broke the
embargo on Nicaragua," he explains, "there was a loophole, and I used
it. The loophole was that if you shipped green Nicaraguan coffee to another
country like Canada and they roasted it there, the product became Canadian.
Under the Helms-Burton Act [a controversial 1996 law which significantly
tightens trade sanctions against Cuba], that loophole has been closed."
Thanksgiving Coffee, founded 30 years ago, roasts a million pounds of coffee
annually from 15 countries, but has been marketing "End the Embargo"
coffee only since 1998. "This project was developed by a team of four
interns that I took on one summer from four
different colleges: Stanford, Oberlin, Bennington and UC Santa Cruz,"
recalled Katzeff. "One of our projects was to bring awareness to U.S.
consumers on Cuba issues. So these four students created 'End the Embargo
Coffee.' They started the idea from scratch and linked
us to Global Exchange,
which was the first benefactor of this project. So
for the first three years, Global Exchange received 15 cents for every package
we sold."
About
a year ago, Thanksgiving Coffee made a switch and decided to promote a different
organization: the US-Cuba Sister Cities Association (USCSCA). This non-profit
group has helped 14 municipalities ranging from Mobile, Alabama, to East
Hampton, New York, establish sister-city relationships with similar-sized cities
across Cuba - despite intense pressure from Cuban exiles who accuse such groups
of giving the Castro regime credibility. "Why doesn't he send his money
instead to an organization that wants to get rid of Fidel Castro? Then there
wouldn't be an embargo," suggests Leonor Gavinia-Valls, vice-president of
F. Gavinia & Sons in Vernon, California. In 1960, at the age of 8, she was
forced to flee Cuba when the Castro regime nationalized Cuba's coffee industry
and took over her family's extensive coffee holdings. "Having a picture of
Che on the label is completely out of line," adds Gavinia-Valls, a
past-president of the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA). "He
was a communist, and there's no freedom whatsoever in Cuba." The Gavinia
family isn't alone in its resentment of Katzeff and his political leanings. In
2000, the SCAA - by then under Katzeff's direction - reached an agreement with
the U.S. Agency for International Development to help improve the quality of
coffee beans in Third World countries. "When Jesse Helms found out that I
was president of the SCAA," said Katzeff, "he directed USAID not to
sign the memorandum if my signature was going to be on the document." But,
like Castro himself, the aging revolutionary is unlikely to be dissuaded.
"I get irate calls from South Florida all the time," he says. "I
tell these people that isolating Cuba is not the answer. They're only hurting
their own families." Adds Johanna Schultz, the company's director of social
and environmental policy: "I heard through the USCSCA that a woman walked
into a store in Wisconsin and started crying hysterically when she saw the image
of Che Guevara. She thought he was a terrorist. They had to take her into a back
room to calm her down." Schultz says that only encourages her company.
"It's good to get a reaction because it gets people thinking," she
says. "Since we can't import Cuban coffee directly, we're using it as an
awareness tool to educate customers about the embargo on Cuba, and get them
questioning why can't we have Cuban coffee in the U.S." Thanksgiving
sells around 30,000 packages of "End the Embargo" Coffee a year. That
translates into roughly $200,000 at wholesale prices, and $270,000 at the retail
level. "These are in the top 15 of our packaged coffees," says
Katzeff, who has a master's degree in social work and runs the $5 million
company with his wife, Joan, and 53 employees. He said around 60% of
Thanksgiving's customers are in northern California, with the other 40% spread
across the nation. "Coffee is one of the best mediums for carrying a
message. It's America's national drink," he explained. "A long time
ago, when we were breaking the embargo on Nicaraguan coffee, Daniel Nunez,
president of Nicaragua's national farm workers union, told me he wanted the
coffee to be as sweet as the revolution. But you cannot sell a revolution on
junk. You must have good coffee." To satisfy his largely upscale, socially
responsible market, Katzeff offers three varieties of certified organic,
shade-grown coffees: dark roast, light roast and decaffeinated. All are
cultivated without the use of pesticides or synthetic fertilizers and harvested
by small farmers' cooperatives in Nicaragua, Guatemala and southern Mexico.
"Cuban coffee is excellent, like the quality of Cuban cigars. But that's
deteriorated, and now the best cigars in the world come from the Dominican
Republic," he says. "On the other hand, Cuba's coffee potential is
phenomenal. The climate hasn't changed. The soil hasn't changed. And it's all
organic." Someday, Katzeff would like to enter into its own twinning
agreement with coffee cooperatives in the province of Santiago de Cuba, allowing
Thanksgiving to not only serve as a corporate sponsor of USCSCA, but also to
help develop a sustained relationship with counterparts on the island.
"When the embargo is over, I want to be there. Right now, my objective is
to show those cooperatives that I'm willing to risk something on their
behalf," says Katzeff, adding that his project director, Nick Hoskins, has
been to Cuba many times, and that his company has already begun developing
contacts in Cuba's coffee-growing regions. "I'm not doing this to make
money. We really believe in this," he says. "This company's history as
an icon for social justice and environmental sensitivity is long and deep. We're
trying to create models that other companies can use and benefit from." Larry
Luxner, a regular contributor to the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal, is editor
and publisher of CubaNews, a monthly newsletter on political and economic
developments in Cuba. He can be reached via e-mail at larry@luxner.com