The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-08-08
Daily Business Editorial
Cubans Are Coming Cotton'S Rise
By RICHARD F. JOHNSTON

l
 Birmingham has the opportunity of increasing volume and variety of business with Cuba. That coun- try is back on it's feet. It is even predicted by close observers that Cubans are destined within less than ten years to be the richest people on earth.
 The federal reserve board has empowered the reserv banks of Bos- ton and Atlanta to establish agen- cies there. This means that banking facilities especially directed toward fostering and promoting American trade in Cuba are to be provided. That adds to the natural incentive to trade with Cuba.
 The opportunity referred to is this: The Southern railway is to put on low round-trip rates from Cuba to southern points, including Birmingham, August 22-24. Num- bers of Cuban business men intend to take advantage of these rates for visit to Atlanta, Chattanooga,
 >ies in the Carolinas and else where in the South. More will come if Southern jobbers and manufac- turers interest themselves in the matter and extend invitations to their Cuban constituents to visit them.
 Birmingham has done a large business in sugar house machinery with Cuba for decades and still does. Cuba takes Alabama coke, cast iron pipe and steel rails and products of the wire mills. It is taking the product of the smaller steel mills that have been estab- lished during the past few years. It takes more and more of Bir- mingham products as they are of- fered.
 On Sunday a cargo of 4,000 to 5000 tons of Birmingham steel products left Mobile for Cuba. Ha- vana is not the only city in Cuba, nor the only port. The steel rail cargo went in the quantities named to points in Cuba as follows:
 IT, IYa,,o-,
 To Cabana: 300 tons.
 To Matanzas: $50 tons.
 To Puerto Tarafa: LIZA tons.
 To Pastello: $50 tons.
 There was in addition a large cargo of bolts, nuts, angle bars, wire, wire nails, sheets and spikes. Evidently there is progressiveness and aggressiveness in more than one place in Cuba.
 What will profit jobbers and manufacturers of Birmingham is to realize that Cubans eat, wear and use everything that we eat, wear and use. Cuba is so close to us that it has absorbed American ideas and tastes automatically.
 Birmingham will have many of these Cuban visitors if her business men make little exertion to have them. Incidentally their trip comes about the same time as Birming- ham is to hold it's merchants con- vention, the trains leaving Havana in just about the right time for the Cubans to participate in that con- vention.
 It would be educational for the Alabama merchants to meet the Gu ban visitors. It would serve to ex- tend their vision of the trade pos abilities of their own state. It would tend to make them broader minded and afford them a sense of the value of that export trade which is of the same value to all Ala bama producers.
 The real cotton is making them sit up and pay attention. There was quite a pessimistic furry for about two weeks, during which, using the listlessness of the hiatus between trading and not trading as lever, the bear side of the cotton market had it's innings. In the flash of Nan eye status of the south- western cotton crop caused an ad- vance of $15 bale, an aggregate of $S0,00O,000 for the crop.
 It behooves him who would keep his head on his shoulders with re- spect to cotton to maintain close eye on statistics always. The facts as to cotton are ever more potent than bit of jockeying during pe- riods when day-by-day speculation rather than actual trading in cot ten is the vogue.