“Some of them had to leave; they had business interests in the United States,” Delaney says. “Others just plain old didn’t want the aggro. But most of them stayed.”
Sometime during this period, he also paid a visit to Washington, DC, where he informed Canada’s embassy staff that he would be making Fidel Castro a major business partner. He knew this would not be popular, given the sensitivity of the subject and Canada’s complex relationship with the United States. “The trade attaché said, ‘What are you going to do?’ ” Delaney recalls, chuckling. “I said, ‘Raise a boatload of capital, for the specific purpose of flying in the face of Helms-Burton.’ ”
Sure enough, in November 1996, eight months after Helms-Burton passed, Delaney received a letter informing him that he was on a US State Department blacklist. Along with all directors and senior officers of Sherritt International and their families, Delaney was denied entry into the United States.
The company remained enough of a bête noire for the anti-Castro lobby in the US over the next few years that in 1998, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a congressman from Florida, remarked that “Delaney has very willingly accepted his role as the most clearly identified business figure in collaboration with the Castro dictatorship. That is a very risky corporate policy, and I would not want to be in Delaney’s or Sherritt’s shoes once the Cuban people are allowed to elect their representatives.” In fact, the consequences of the deal for Sherritt had long since begun to take effect: before Delaney struck his deal with Castro, more than half of the company’s nickel had been sold in the United States.
With its new corporate structure in place and its political course charted, Sherritt International started the next phase of its Cuban play: diversification. It began to invest in the country’s fledgling oil and gas sector and built up its utilities business, providing Cubans with a stable source of electricity and solidifying Sherritt’s position as one of the country’s best foreign friends. “When people click a light on at home,” Delaney explains, “we want them to know that a Sherritt plant is delivering the electricity.” From a business perspective, the results were spectacular. By 1997, output at Moa alone had increased to 26,500 tonnes, more than twice its 1994 production. Sherritt had lost $20 million on its metals business in 1993, but its half of the Cuban joint venture earned $30 million on sales of $147 million in 1996. In 1997, when most mining companies were hit hard by low metal prices, its profit jumped by $4 million.
On a personal level, Delaney began to enjoy his most favoured capitalist status. He framed the letter from the US State Department, which he still keeps in his Toronto office. (The downstairs boardroom is decorated with cartoons lampooning the US trade embargo.) He also started getting to know Fidel. “We hosted a cocktail party down there in one of those protocol houses in Havana,” he says. “Castro arrived at 10:30 p.m. There must have been a hundred people there; he got around to talk to every one of them.” As host, Delaney accompanied Castro, but by 2:30 in the morning he was ready to drop. “My back is killing me. My arches have collapsed. I desperately need to go to the bathroom, and he’s still firing along.” Eventually, Castro looked at his watch and realized the time. “So he’s heading for the door. But on the way out, he taps one of his senior ministers on the shoulder and says, ‘Hey, I feel pretty good. Let’s go wake up some ambassadors!’ ”
Fun with Fidel aside, doing business in Cuba carries with it special challenges and risks. For starters, there are ongoing questions over who actually owns the property Sherritt has been using on the island, and in particular the Moa operations. The Helms-Burton Act states that the US trade embargo cannot be lifted until property considered interfered with by the Cuban government has reverted to its rightful owners. What’s more, it authorizes American citizens to sue, in American courts, any foreign national or company that purchased or made use of property nationalized by Cuba after the revolution. Freeport-McMoRan could therefore, in theory, pursue a claim over Sherritt’s interests at Moa.
It’s also conceivable that Sherritt would benefit in the event the embargo is lifted, since its history in the country would give it a powerful comparative advantage and, barring punitive action, it would regain access to the enormous US market for its oil, gas, and nickel products. In April, when the Obama administration announced it was lifting travel restrictions on Cuban Americans going to the island, Sherritt’s stock jumped 25 percent.
The company’s expansion and success in Cuba raise some important questions about its relationship with the local workforce, however. Those lucky enough to find jobs with Sherritt remain, by North American standards, extremely poor. Rodolfo’s salary of 50 convertible pesos, which he regarded as princely, works out to about $60 a month. Discussing the company’s policies concerning workers in developing countries, Delaney says, “We have to be careful we don’t induce inflation. If the average wage is $2 a day, you can’t just start hiring people for $10 an hour.” He also points to what he calls Sherritt’s near-perfect record on labour issues, not only in Cuba but worldwide. “We have one of the best labour management accords in North America,” he says. “At the conclusion of present contracts, we will have gone sixty-two years — twenty-two on my watch — without ever losing a person-day because of a labour dispute.”
Delaney’s claim appears quite correct across the company’s global divisions, but then labour disputes aren’t exactly encouraged in Cuba. According to Daniel Wilkinson of Human Rights Watch, the Castro regime has systematically repressed virtually all forms of political dissent, denying its citizens such basic human rights as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to organize in pursuit of better wages and working conditions.
