New Delhi hits hurdles in vehicles picked for Cuba

Eek! US is ticking under my bonnet
- New Delhi hits hurdles in vehicles picked for Cuba
CHARU SUDAN KASTURI

New Delhi, Oct. 22: Decorum teaches recipients never to look a gift horse in the mouth. But diplomacy demands that donors must look under the hood before they gift buses to Cuba.

India did so and found that the buses it had originally shortlisted for Havana had two key components with links to American firms.

US-associated components in consignments headed for Cuba are the modern-day equivalent of wrapping a gift in red and dumping it among a herd of steaming bulls.

Any handover of the low-floor range of Tata buses to Havana would have instantly violated a half-century-old embargo imposed by the US on Cuba after Fidel Castro and his comrades overthrew the Batista regime and then nationalised American properties on the island.

The upshot: low-floor buses of the kind now seen in Calcutta will not make it to Havana’s streets despite India’s pledge to help Cuba salvage its rickety urban public transport. New Delhi wanted to send the buses as a diplomatic counter to China’s growing influence in Latin America.

India is now sheepishly offering Cuba another line of less powerful buses.

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