Foreign Correspondent: Aug 18

Tonight Foreign Correspondent looks at Cuba as it as awaits the lifting of a 55 year old trade ban.

With the US poised to lift its 55 year trade embargo, reporter Eric Campbell tells the remarkable story of how one American farming family befriended Fidel Castro and helped end Cuba’s isolation.

It was 2002, in Havana, Cuba. They didn’t know it back then, but American farm boys Cliff and Seth Kaehler were making history.

The brothers, aged 11 and 13, flanked President Fidel Castro in the front row at a state concert. At an official ceremony they stood beside him as he gently patted their heads and pointedly declared, in one of his typically marathon orations: “We are already negotiating with the future generation of American farmers.”

And indeed a deal was done, with the boys’ father Ralph making the first US cattle trade with Cuba since Castro’s revolution.

Now, 13 years on, the entrepreneurial Kaehlers are returning to Cuba to crank up business again – as Cubans await the lifting of the stifling trade ban.

Reporter Eric Campbell follows the Kaehler family as they renew old acquaintances and make new friends – people like the Carriles family who are farmers like the Kaehlers but different in so many ways. While Ralph and Mena Kaehler employ the latest technology on their Minnesota farm, the Carriles men and women toil with basic tools and grow everything they eat.

As they share Cuban cigars and a freshly barbecued pig, both families agree that it’s time to get trade humming again between their countries, despite human rights protests from Cuban exiles.

“We need to end all this animosity,” says Ralph Kaehler. “As our trade opens up, Cuba will be in our top 20 trading partners.”

In the capital Havana, Eric Campbell finds the locals keener to make money than revolution. These days there are fewer Che Guevara billboards. There are more classic 1950s American cars roaming the potholed streets, and funky bars are flourishing.

As a Havana nightclub hipster put it: “We now see hope in showing our talent to the world. We Cubans are, how you say, cool. We are super cool.”

Tuesday, August 18 at 8 pm on ABC.