Cuba bought 6,000 tonnes of US durum wheat during the week ended April 15, the first durum sale since reporting began in 1973, the US Agriculture Department said on Thursday.
In its weekly export sales report, the USDA said Cuba purchased 38,000 tonnes of wheat for the 2003/04 marketing year and 75,000 tonnes for 2004/05.
US wheat industry officials, along with other commodity groups, were in Cuba last week to promote American agricultural commodities.
Dawn Forsythe, spokeswoman for US Wheat Associates, said her organisation was "confident" that American firms had made several sales of wheat, each of them under 100,000 tonnes.
She said she did not know the total tonnage of the new Cuban wheat purchases and said some of them might not show up under USDA's weekly reporting system this week.
Cuba is now the leading buyer of US wheat in the Caribbean, with at least 323,000 tonnes already shipped this year and another 130,000 tonnes awaiting shipment, Forsythe said. Most of the purchases are for hard red winter wheat, ideal for baking bread.
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