CANADIAN SNOWBIRDS.

As a vicious winter storm lashed Canada's largest city, Toronto, in mid-January and plunged its capital into a deep freeze, many people headed for what has become the trendiest tourist destination for Canadians: Cuba, reports IPS (January 19, 1999): While Florida and the U.S. South remain the most popular destination of winter-weary Canadians -- called snowbirds -- Cuba has become extremely popular with young people looking for an affordable winter holiday. Canadian travel agencies have sold more than 200,000 inexpensive all-inclusive tour packages to Cuba this winter; "Cubans really roll out the red carpet," said Pauline Woodruff, a travel agent in Thunder Bay, a city of 130,000 on the north shore of Lake Superior. She has visited Cuba three times in the past four years. "The country is beautiful. It's not over-developed, like so many Caribbean resorts, and it's very affordable," she said; Tourists from Canada now make up the single largest bloc among the 1.2 million visitors who go to Cuba every year. Cuba has surpassed the Dominican Republic (150,000) and Jamaica (100,000) as a winter destination for Canadians; In October, Cuban Canadian Resorts International, a Toronto real estate company, announced plans for a joint venture (the first of its kind here) to build 2,000 beachfront condominiums at a cost of US$200 million. The project, called Cuban Club Resorts, will include luxury and time-share units in four locations. Construction will begin in March on a 340-unit complex at Maria del Mar, 18 kms east of Havana, and at Santa Lucia, on the northeast coast, where 260 units will be built; Canadian companies doing business in Cuba risk retaliation under the Helms-Burton Act, which allows U.S. citizens to sue companies that do business in both Cuba and the U.S. in order to recover property expropriated by the Cuban Government. Jim Moore, vice president policy of the Alliance of Manufacturers and Exporters Canada, says "all companies that are active in the U.S. as well as Cuba are very, very nervous; "The best advice, and most companies are following this very rigidly, is to keep an extremely low profile. The Cuban-Americans maintain what they call the Hall of Shame List, of companies whose names are gleaned largely from media reports;" Companies that set up factories or exploit Cuban national resources are much more vulnerable to action under Helms-Burton, says a Canadian bank official. Sherritt International Corp., which has a US$200-million investment in Cuban mining, oil and tourism projects, is being sued by a Delaware company, Consolidated Development Corp., which claims Sherritt is exploiting oil fields seized from Consolidated by the Cuban Government in 1959.