I proceeded to finish my round of golf. Fortunately for the troopers, I finished strong. I think I parred three of the last four holes, and felt pretty good about myself again. Thanks to the game of golf, I simmered down and came to my better senses.
And they caught the guy later that afternoon. They nailed him because this bozo even put out his intentions over the Internet. How dumb can you be? That’s worse than leaving a fingerprint. Threatening a public official with violence is a felony, and he ended up serving time.
I had just gotten tired, after the incessant threats, of feeling like the hunted. My SEAL came out in me. We’ve got an old saying, “We don’t get mad, we get even.” And we make no bones about being the hunters.
“Can we quit talking about this now?”
I can tell these particular “fond memories” are making Terry a little anxious, so we begin reminiscing about the first time we went together to Mexico. It was a trade mission, my first one as governor, in the summer of 2000. “Honey, remember when we went to the famous Corona brewery, and found out that all the beer is made with Minnesota corn?” I ask her.
“Well, sure,” she says, “Minnesota has the best corn, and Mexico knows it.” They’d shown us pallets of corn, all with Minnesota stamps on them, which come down by train. So every time I drank a Corona, I thought, it might have the Mexican lime, but there’s also a little taste of Minnesota.
One of the other highlights had been attending an authentic Mexican rodeo in Guadalajara. The charros, their cowboys, are unique, especially when it comes to calf roping. Our American cowboys rope the calf, then jump off the horse, run over and flip the calf and tie him up, and get all dirty in the process. The Mexican cowboy never leaves the saddle and accomplishes the same thing.
I was so pleased when they allowed my First Lady to pick any horse and ride it in the rodeo. Terry chose a beautiful Palomino. It was remarkably well trained, and she was out there spinnin’ the circles with her dark hair flying. Traditionally in Mexico, women don’t ride the charros’ horses.
“I think they were pretty impressed with your horse skills,” I say to Terry. “Also the fact that you would ride, and I wouldn’t.”
“Well, you’re not a horse person,” she says.
“Yup, you can out-ride me any day, babe. But put us on Harleys, and I’ll beat you!”
She laughed. “That’s true,” she says.
I started thinking about how so many of us in the United States, myself included, have a false impression of Mexico because of the border towns—which we created. Mexicali, Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, Juarez, and others largely came into existence because of our outlawing of alcohol. When Prohibition happened in the U.S. in the 1920s, a lot of drinkers simply ran across the border into Mexico. That’s what also brought about all the prostitution and gambling activities in those little towns. Mexico is still dealing with this today, the result of our Prohibition.
Border areas like Mexicali are also coping with another of our exports—the multinational corporation. Since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, which eliminated most trade restrictions between our two countries, hundreds of factories called maquiladoras have sprung up. There they make goods on the cheap and ship them back across the border. Companies like Sony, Mitsubishi, Honeywell, and Daewoo now have assembly plants in Mexicali. The big food processors like Nestlé are visible, too.
President Clinton predicted this would be a boon to everyone. It certainly has been for the corporations, which have cut back their labor costs and increased their profits. Thousands of workers from Mexico’s poorest southern states have arrived to work in Mexicali. They make the equivalent, I was told, of a little more than four dollars a day. But it’s better than having no job at all. So, on the one hand, Mexicali is experiencing an economic boom. It’s constantly growing, with close to a million people now. Many of the newly rich have moved into gated communities.
I’m a staunch capitalist, and I was a big supporter ofNAFTA in the beginning. Today, I have a lot of reservations about what it’s brought about. NAFTA has resulted in hundreds of thousands of job losses in the U.S., because employers moved south of the border. Half of the people working in these Mexican maquiladoras are women, and there is also child labor, and long hours, with no right to unionize. They’re really nothing more than sweatshops, in a lot of cases.
On the outskirts of town, you see the ramshackle homes made from cinder blocks and scraps of metal. You see the waste-littered streets. Often, these people have no running water or electricity. They are the people of the maquiladoras. So driving through Mexicali does make you wonder—what price, in terms of quality of life, are a lot of people paying in order to enrich these companies? Would they maybe be better off sticking with agriculture, since the Mexicali Valley produces some of the biggest crops in all Mexico?
“It makes me think of my grandfather,” I say to Terry as we ease out of town onto Mexico Highway 5. “He’d grown up working in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, after his parents came to this country from Slovakia. He knew it was gonna kill him, and that’s why he brought my dad and his other kids out to Minnesota. Looking for a better life. So you can’t blame the poorest Mexicans for coming to northern Baja, trying to find the same thing. It’s just . . .”
My voice cracks for a minute. Terry fills in my sentence. “What are the real opportunities?”
CHAPTER 6
Breaking Down Barriers: China and Cuba
“History will absolve me.”
—Fidel Castro
Passing through Mexicali, I can’t help but think about another country I’ve had an opportunity to visit: China. Early in the twentieth century, Mexicali was actually more Chinese than Mexican, and even today the border town has probably the highest concentration of Chinese residents within Mexico.
Originally, the Chinese came as laborers working for the Colorado River Land Company that was building a massive irrigation system in the Valle de Mexicali. As often happened with immigrant labor, the high wages they were promised never came to pass. In fact, a desert peak below Mexicali is still called “El Chinero,” commemorating the deaths of about 160 laborers who never made it across the San Felipe Desert. A Mexican boatman had dropped them off with assurances that Mexicali was close by; in fact, it was forty miles of burning desert away.
The laborers who survived created their own Chinatown which, during the Prohibition era, had an underground tunnel setup that led to the whorehouses and opium dens and, for the bootleggers, across to Calexico on the American side. Later on, Mexicali served as Mexican headquarters for the nationalist Chinese party of Sun Yat-Sen. Today, in Mexicali’s Chinatown, you hear people talking a blend of Spanish and Cantonese and, like one of our guidebooks says, “Only in Mexicali will you find banners of the Virgin of Guadalupe hanging side by side with Chinese paper lamps.”
Interestingly, the University of Minnesota has the largest population of Chinese students of any campus in the U.S. and, when I was governor, I met with a group of about twenty of them. They’d told me that 80 percent of their people are still involved in agriculture, but that China’s farmland is pretty much maxed out. I thought it would be great if U.S. farmers, in Minnesota and elsewhere, could sell their surpluses to China. Here we’ve got grain rotting away in silos, but the potential profit from doing this could be enormous and we’d be helping their people at the same time.
I became a big supporter of bringing China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), something that was also one of President Clinton’s foremost concerns. They’d moved from a strictly command economy to one where market forces were playing an increasing part, and it was definitely time to break down the remaining trade barriers. In May 2000, Clinton invited me to the White House again as part of a gathering of dignitaries to discuss China and the WTO, for what he called “the most important national security vote that will be cast this year.” I was honored to be sitting in the front row, not far from former presidents Carter
and Ford. Clinton called his plan “an American vote. You know, it unites Henry Kissinger”—the president paused a moment, glancing down at Kissinger—“and Jesse Ventura. And not at a wrestling match!” (I guess Bill still had a sense of humor about me, despite my suggestion a couple of months earlier about taking out that hill in the Middle East).
His administration encouraged me to take an active role, and I’m proud to have been a part of the effort that resulted in China being admitted to the WTO in December 2001. That’s how I ended up spending a week in China on a trade mission early the next year. First in Beijing for several days, and then Shanghai.
It was humbling for me to be in China. There was an entire dinner in my honor in the Great Hall of the People, right near where the students were run over by the tanks at Tiananmen Square. I sure never figured a day would come in my life when the most populous country in the world would have a dinner dedicated to me in their most important building! I remember the food came in six or seven different courses, and was just remarkable. I also remember multitudes of toasts. The Chinese seem to be very big on toasting.
Whenever I traveled, I was never caught in a traffic jam because all the streets were completely blocked off when I passed through. High-level foreign visitors are treated well. What impressed me most about China was its cleanliness, and how orderly the people are. They seem have a natural humility, going about their business and sticking to themselves.
But China is definitely absorbing Western culture. I went there expecting to see everyone running around looking like Mao Tsetung. Well, at times you will see the traditional Chinese, if you get out to rural areas, but in the cities I saw more golf shirts and jeans than you could imagine. Not only do they dress like us, but they’re building freeways now with the identical green signs that we have. Underneath the Chinese language, there are smaller letters written in English.
I was amazed at how they can be—it’s almost an oxymoron—so rich and so poor at the same time. I found out from my agriculture commissioner, Gene Hugeson, that the average farm size in China is one acre. I said, “Gene, we couldn’t even turn one of our big tractors on an acre!” He laughed and said, “You’re right, governor.”
The people live very meagerly, but construction is happening at an unbelievable rate. I was informed that, in the late 1990s, 20 percent of the world’s T-cranes, the big ones that build skyscrapers, were in Shanghai. In Shanghai, you could put three or four New York Cities in the downtown skyline. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m still trying to figure out where all the revenue comes from, I guess maybe in large part from us—because China now holds a large part of America’s debt.
I found the two cities to be completely different. Beijing was as attractive, and seemed very businesslike. Of course, that’s where the Forbidden City is, the center of government. I found Shanghai much more of a fun city beneath all the commerce going on. You walk the streets after dark, and it’s every bit as vibrant as New York. Young people and lights, a rollicking night life.
In a country that’s supposed to be communist, that may sound kind of amazing, but I think it’s by design. Even though China now has Hong Kong back, that city is still a product of the Brits. The Chinese look at Hong Kong as something of a bastard child that they want to crack on the head every now and then for misbehaving. But they can hold up Shanghai as moving into the twenty first century the Chinese way.
The food I ate in China was unbelievably good. Unfortunately, as I would also come to find out in Mexico, we’re being cheated somewhat in the United States—because the native culture’s foods are far better than the so-called Mexican and Chinese that we get here. For some reason, we believe everything needs to be deep-fried. Rarely is any food served that way in China. I’m trying to figure out what gets lost in translation once it crosses our border. Like their mandarin duck—oh, incredible!
You do a lot of “stick eating” over there—food cooked on sticks like shish kabobs. It seems that’s a popular way of cooking food in Asia. When I served in Southeast Asia for seventeen months, there was nothing better than barbecue on a stick! Somehow I think a stick holds flavor better than metal does. But you’ve got to be smarter with your barbecuing, because it’s easier to burn the stick and lose the food. We Americans are in too much of a hurry, that’s why we go with metal.
While I was there, Minnesota’s 3M company signed a contract to produce all of China’s license plates. The deal had been in the offing for a while—I really had no bearing on it—but it was signed, sealed, and delivered that week. The other thing that’s going great guns in China is Hormel Meats. Minnesota has a Hormel plant that’s now producing all the sausage for their pizza. And the Chinese have started to go crazy over pizza.
I hate to say this, but the McDonald’s in China are packed, too. Apparently they haven’t seen the movie Supersize Me. Did you know that McDonald’s brought a lawsuit to try to keep that documentary off the air in America? I haven’t eaten fast food since I saw it, and I feel guilty that I ever took my kids there. Think about it: They put warning labels on cigarettes, but ordinarily you wouldn’t die from smoking in less than twenty years. With McDonald’s, it’s been proven that if you eat there for forty-five days straight, you’re dead. There should be a warning label on the wrapper telling people to beware of eating only at McDonald’s. Something like, “You need to supplement your diet with foods other than what this place serves.”
Anyway, I enjoyed visiting the Hormel factory. Although it’s overseen by the U.S., the upper management are all Chinese. I know it sounds like a cliché, but you could literally eat off the floor. The plant is out in the suburbs, where farming is still going on. Right up the street, you’ll see the family with the one-acre farm and the big-horned cow.
I came away from China fully realizing that they will be the economic power of the world, and a lot quicker than anyone imagines. Within the next decade, I would say. You truly feel it being there. When the Chinese people focus on something, they are gung-ho. And what a work force they have! One fifth of the human population!
I’d predicted, when I testified before Congress in favor of China entering the WTO back in 2000, that their trade with the U.S. could triple within the next twenty years. Well, it’s already started to happen. U.S. exports to China have continued to increase dramatically since they became part of the WTO. In fact, from 1999 to 2004, they went up nearly ten times faster than our exports to the rest of the world. And China has become one of the fastest-growing overseas markets for the American farmer—our agricultural exports to the Chinese topped more than $5 billion in 2003.
I only wish I could say that our government is as forward-thinking about another country that we’ve long been alienated from. And that one is only ninety miles off our shores.
Not long after we cross the U.S.-Mexico border, I shake my head and say to Terry: “Isn’t it crazy? No one even looked at our passports. But if we wanted to travel to Cuba, and got caught by our government, our passports would end up revoked! We might even get sent to jail. Remember when the Bush people stopped you from going along with me on the trade mission?”
That was a trip Terry had really wanted to make. “They’ve been trying to get rid of Castro, one way or another, for almost fifty years,” she says. “I wonder when they’ll just give it up.”
I grew up in fear of Fidel Castro. I was young in 1959 when his revolution in Cuba took place, so it wasn’t high on my radar screen. But I remember the propaganda. I vaguely recall hearing about the Bay of Pigs. It dominated the Walter Cronkite news at 5:30 when I’d be home from school. As a kid, the name fascinated me. Why would they name a place after pigs?
As an adult, when I started reading books trying to figure out what really happened to President Kennedy, Castro and Cuba of course loomed large. So did Oswald and his Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his attempt to get a visa to Cuba on a trip to Mexico. So Cuba has fascinated me for years, though I never dreamed I’d have a chance to actually go ther
e, much less to spend an hour with Castro himself.
I must admit to having another fixation about Cuba. When Clinton was president and I attended my first National Governors Convention, I raised my hand and questioned him about why we continued to have an economic boycott against the Cubans. I had definite personal reasons. At the time, I was smoking cigars, and I said that I was sick and tired of having to feel like a criminal every time I wanted a Cuban cigar, because they’re some of the best in the world. At some point during Clinton’s presidency, Cuba had shot down an American plane that strayed over its air space. Clinton talked about that, and the allegations of human rights violations, as justifications for why the boycott had to continue. Which still didn’t fly much with me.
Jeb Bush was governor of Florida and, at the end of the meeting, he sent word over to me: “Stop bringing up Cuba. It causes me too many problems when you do that.” He also let it be known that he would get me all the Cuban cigars I wanted if I kept my mouth shut. At the time I was smoking Romeo Julietas. They come in these neat-looking silver tubes and I had an empty one. So, as I passed by the governor on my way out, I stuck it in the front of his coat pocket and said, “There’s my brand, Jeb, except I don’t think a box of cigars can buy me off.” And I kept on walking.
Amazingly, two weeks later at my governor’s residence, there arrived a box of Romeo Julieta Cubans! I can’t recall whether Jeb Bush personally sent it, or if it just came anonymously. But I laughed—you mean Jeb really thinks I’ll stay quiet about Cuba for a few cigars?
My last year in office, 2002, a Minnesota trade mission to Cuba came about after a few of the sanctions dealing with food and agricultural products had been lifted. This provided us an opening to seek deals with the Cuban government, for humanitarian purposes. President Bush did not want me to personally go. The White House sent a clear message on that.
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! Page 11