WHO GETS WHAT

Published Thursday, December 4, 1997, in the Miami Herald WHO GETS WHAT

Cuban exile and rights groups in line for the federal funds, authorized by the 1996 Helms-Burton Act but never distributed:

The U.S.-Cuba Business Council, headed by Otto Reich, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela. Reich's group stands to receive $300,000 to hold conferences on the Cuban economy, prepare Cubans for setting up small businesses, line up private-sector support for a democratic Cuba.

The newly created Institute for Democracy in Cuba, a coalition of 10 anti-Castro groups, whose leaders include director Rafael Sanchez-Aballi and Nick Gutierrez, a Miami attorney who played an important role in crafting the Helms-Burton property sanctions.

The institute, which hopes to receive $800,000 over two years, plans to distribute materials to Cuba dissidents and help disseminate reports by independent journalists.

$195,000 to the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, an AFL-CIO organ working with European unions to persuade firms doing business in Cuba to adhere to codes of conduct that ensure workers' rights and to prepare emerging labor leaders on the island.

$400,000 to the Center for a Free Cuba, which is run by Frank Calzon and whose board includes former Bacardi Chairman Manuel Jorge Cutillas, former U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Elena Diaz-Verson Amos, a Cuban exile philanthropist.

Calzon, who received the only grant so far in his former post as Washington representative of Freedom House, has applied for the new funds to continue his work, which includes smuggling books, videos, medicines, typewriters and the like to island dissidents.

Calzon said his group sent more than 30 people to Cuba and distributed books by George Orwell, Pope John Paul II and independent Cuban journalists. ``I'm very proud of what we did,'' he said.

$110,000 to Ernesto Betancourt, the former director of Radio Marti, to measure Cuban public opinion by polling travelers and recent arrivals and conducting telephone interviews.

$136,000 to the International Foundation of Electoral Systems to produce an analysis of the technical challenges posed by holding free elections in a transitional Cuba.

$85,000 to the SABRE Foundation, a liberal group that seeks to donate books on medicine, agriculture, business and political science to Cubans through Catholic Relief Services.

$120,000 to Cuba Free Press, an organization that seeks to promote the work of independent journalists through the Internet and contacts with U.S. media.