TORONTO -- (AP) -- A Canadian company's decision to hold a board meeting in Cuba is not an attempt to defy U.S. trade sanctions, one of its senior executives said Thursday.
Sherritt International is Cuba's biggest foreign investor and its continued trade with Havana has drawn U.S. ire. Washington recently forbade executives of the mining company from entering the United States.
But Sherritt executive Patrice Merrin Best said today's meeting is merely standard business practice, not intended to raise tensions.
``This is normal course of business,'' she said in a telephone interview from Havana. ``We move the board meeting through all the places we have businesses and directors.''
Recent stepped-up U.S. sanctions under the Helms-Burton law penalize foreign companies that use property in Cuba that was confiscated from American citizens after the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
About 40 Canadian firms, many of them mining companies, do business in Cuba. Sherritt mines nickel and cobalt in eastern Cuba, using facilities the United States contends were formerly owned by Freeport-MacMoRan Co. of New Orleans.
Sherritt reportedly has more than $200 million invested in Cuba in mining, oil exploration, agriculture and tourism.
Helms-Burton was enacted this year in response to the downing, by Cuban air force jets, of two unarmed Cessnas flown by members of a Miami-based Cuban exile group.
So far, none of the seven Sherritt executives and board members blacklisted by the United States have been in a position to be denied entry into the United States, Merrin Best said.
© 1996 The Miami Herald.