CIENFUEGOS, Cuba -- Seventy-two thousand pounds of food for hurricane victims remained in a warehouse at Havana's International Airport on Tuesday, three full days after it arrived from Miami, still snarled in government red tape.
Roman Catholic Church officials said they were still hoping the food could be trucked to Cienfuegos -- four hours from Havana -- late Tuesday night so that distribution to victims of Hurricane Lili could begin this morning.
``Everything is ready to go on this end,'' said Carlos Pulido, head of the Cienfuegos office of Caritas Cuba, one of three Catholic groups spearheading the aid effort. ``We have the plan and the people to carry it out. All we need is the food.''
The food, collected over the past two weeks in Miami in a controversial drive to help victims of the hurricane that destroyed more than 5,600 homes, reached Cuba Saturday night. But it has never gotten past the airport.
Pulido said the delay has been caused by government testing of nearly 20,000 pounds of milk. Tests on rice and beans, the other two major components of the aid shipment, have been completed.
``But testing for sanitation of the milk is much slower,'' Pulido said, ``and we just have to wait for them to finish.''
Testing of the milk has been complicated because it came from about a dozen different sources.
``There's powdered milk in boxes, evaporated milk in cans, every kind of milk you can think of,'' said the Rev. David Kubala, pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle parish in Kendall. Kubala arrived in Cuba on Monday, part of the management team from Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, which launched the aid project. He said the latest delay had nothing to do with slogans on boxes of food that some Cuban government officials labeled propaganda.
``That's all been resolved,'' Kubala said. ``That's not a problem at all.''
Slogans -- including exilio (exile) and Por Cuba, el amor todo lo puede (For Cuba, love conquers all) -- were lettered on many of the boxes of food. But church officials said that since the food had to be repackaged into small parcels anyway, the slogans weren't an obstacle.
Pulido said about 60 workers from his office will distribute 10,000 family-size packages of food at 26 government-run grocery stores in the city of Cienfuegos and three areas in the nearby Escambray mountains around the town of Cumanayagua.
``I'll believe it when I see it,'' said a Cienfuegos taxi driver. Like many other residents, he has been hearing about foreign aid for hurricane victims for nearly a week without seeing any of it. Donations from Spain, Mexico, the United Nations and other sources haven't arrived either.
Copyright © 1996 The Miami Herald