MOBILE, ALA. — The barges bound for Cuba already glide down the Mobile River from time to time, past James K. Lyons' office and south to the Gulf of Mexico.
These days, Lyons, the director of the Alabama State Port Authority, dreams of when the Cuban trade embargo will be fully dismantled. That would mean more barges loaded with even more goods from Alabama.
For Mobile, the state's graceful colonial port of call, it would also mean the revival of a commercial relationship with Havana that is older than the United States.
"They are one of our closest neighbors, and a historical trading partner, and we've drifted too far apart," Lyons said here recently, in his office overlooking the busy port of Mobile. "Where's the cheapest and best place for them to buy? It's here."
The debate over U.S.-Cuba policy has long been dominated by voices from Florida, home to the majority of Cuban Americans. But this year, as the Obama administration and Congress consider thawing U.S.-Cuba relations, support for a more lenient policy is emerging in, of all places, the conservative South, where Cuba is seen less as a Cold War antagonist than as a rare growth market.
In 2000, Congress passed an agricultural exemption to the trade embargo, and last year, Americans shipped $718 million in goods to the communist island, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Alabama regularly sends cotton, corn, soybeans, railroad ties and utility poles, the latter being in particular demand after hurricanes, according to John Key, the state Agriculture Department's director of international trade.
Every state agriculture commissioner along the Gulf of Mexico now supports easing the Cuban embargo, with the unsurprising exception of Charles Bronson, the Republican agriculture commissioner in Florida.
And although polls show that Republicans around the country tend to support the U.S.-Cuba status quo, the Gulf-state commissioners in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas are Republicans.
"These people are seeing Cuba as the last economic frontier, especially at a time when markets are shrinking or stagnant," said Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy for the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. "It's going to make for a much more favorable climate for lifting the embargo."
In Alabama, the call for change is by no means unanimous; Republican Gov. Bob Riley has said he supports the embargo as it is. But other leaders have been publicly savoring the possibilities of reconnecting with a market of about 11.4 million people just 626 miles from downtown Mobile.
