El Salvador President Mauricio Funes is planning to bring a delegation of businesspeople to Havana.

The trip was initially planned for the first week of September, but Funes delayed it on Aug. 23, due to “questions of the national agenda.” No new target dates have been set.

“This is not only a visit to relaunch [diplomatic] relations with Cuba, suspended during 50 years,” Funes told Salvadorean daily El Mundo a week earlier. “It’s about opening business opportunities for Salvadoran entrepreneurs.”

Funes cited a number of Salvadoran companies already doing business with Cuba, such as Industrias Capri (export of mattresses), López Davidson (export of pharmaceuticals), and Taca Airlines (flights to and within Cuba). 

Cuba is expected to provide health, education and sports services to El Salvador, and the two countries will cooperate in scientific research. The details are currently being negotiated.

In what seems like an appeal to Salvadorean businesspeople, Funes said that “entrepreneurs don’t have an ideology. Entrepreneurs look for business opportunities, no matter whether that’s in Brazil, the United States, Guatemala or Cuba.”

“It’s a myth that El Salvador hasn’t had relations with Cuba recently. We’ve had them, just not on a diplomatic level, from government to government, but we’ve had them on a business level. There’s a number of [Congressional] deputies and former deputies, including from [the right-wing] Arena [party] that go to heal their illnesses in Cuba. They don’t think about ideological differences, they think about the advance of medicine in Cuba, and they go to have their treatments because it’s much more effective and a lot cheaper. This is what I want to stimulate.”

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.