For the first time in 50 years, a cargo ship left the US city of Miami on Wednesday headed directly for Cuba, carrying a load of humanitarian supplies, officials said. "This first ship, the Ana Cecilia, left with humanitarian shipments, and we are assured that there was nothing to be sold in Cuba," shipping company spokesman Leonardo Sanchez-Adega told AFP.
The company, International Port Corp, says it has obtained a special permit from US authorities, which complies with Washington's half-century-old trade embargo on the Communist-run island.
Sanchez-Adega added his company plans for ships to leave each Wednesday on the 17-hour trip to Havana, where the 10-member crew will unload its cargo and return, without ever going ashore.
Its clients for the weekly shipment include charitable, religious and humanitarian groups, as well as relatives of people living in Cuba, he said.
More than 800,000 Cuban-Americans live in Florida, most in the Miami area.
The Ana Cecilia can carry up to 16 containers, for which the company is charging $5.99 a pound, or about $13 a kilogram.
Other Florida companies ship to Cuba, most through third countries, but Sanchez-Adega says they are the first to offer weekly service directly from Miami to Havana.
A regular shipping route also exists from Port Everglades, Florida, south of Miami, to Cuba. Ships with US government permits set sail weekly through Crowley Maritime from that port, carrying humanitarian and agricultural goods.
That weekly route has been open for a decade, with the United States becoming a key farm and food supplier to Cuba even as it claims Havana deserves tough sanctions.
The US embargo against Cuba was declared by president John F. Kennedy in 1962 - aimed at bringing down the Americas' only one-party Communist regime. That regime remains in place under President Raul Castro.
The US embargo has been condemned by a majority of the United Nations General Assembly each year since 1992. Cuban-American Florida lawmaker Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on June 19 sent a letter to the Treasury Department, where the Office of Foreign Assets Control is in charge of US sanctions, questioning whether there was anything illegal about the new Miami-Havana shipping route.