WASHINGTON - Strolling on the veranda of Havana's Hotel Nacional on a humid September day in 2002, Jesse Ventura puffed on genuine Cuban puros and talked up a future of tall orders for Minnesota farmers.

Five years later, farmers like Ralph Kaehler have done millions of dollars in business with the Cubans, sticking it out through the ups and downs of Fidel Castro's turbulent relations with his Yanqui neighbors to the north.

Next month, Minnesota Agriculture Commissioner Gene Hugoson will go to Havana to check on the state's declining business prospects, and, with the aging dictator ailing, to see firsthand what a post-Castro business environment might look like. "A lot of it is just showing interest," Hugoson said. "I believe there will be more openness down the road."

Hugoson, who was part of Ventura's trade mission in 2002, is no stranger to Cuba. But it is likely to be a very different Cuba he sees.

"The communications back from Havana have been quiet lately," said Kaehler, a St. Charles farmer and a pioneer in cattle sales to Cuba.

Kaehler and other frequent business visitors to Cuba report just as much hunger for food buys, but more weariness about depending on U.S. suppliers who face many bureaucratic obstacles at home. Visitors see Castro far less often.

"We're seeing a post-Castro era unfold before our very eyes," said Kirby Jones, founder and president of the U.S. Cuba Trade Association, a Washington group that promotes open trade with the Communist island nation.

Kaehler, who has been to Cuba a dozen times since his sons, Cliff and Seth, became special guests at Castro's 2002 trade show, says the Cubans are still buying. Just not as much.

Minnesota agricultural exports to Cuba, which had grown to $22 million in 2005, dropped to $18.3 million last year, according to the Minnesota Agriculture Department.

Total U.S. farm exports to Cuba dropped to $321 million last year, down from $346 million in 2005.

The reason, according to Kaehler and others who do business with Cuba, is part price-squeeze and part politics.

Spiking worldwide prices in soybeans and corn have limited what the cash-strapped regime can buy. Soybeans and corn are Minnesota's leading farm exports to Cuba.

Another factor is crude-oil prices, which have hit record levels, taking shipping costs up with them.

That, along with Bush administration edicts requiring cash-up-front sales, has lessened the cachet of doing deals in Havana, where locals still carry food-rationing cards.

'Room for improvement'

"It's not easy," said Tim Courneya, vice president of the Frazee, Minn.-based Northarvest Bean Growers Association, which has seen U.S. sales of dried beans to Cuba level off to around 10 percent of the 80,000- to 100,000-ton market they once hoped it could be. Still, he says, there's hope for more.

In retrospect, it turns out Ventura's trip came at something of a high-water mark in trade relations between Cuba and the United States, which slapped an economic embargo on the Castro regime shortly after the 1959 revolution.

As Ventura announced his trip, Congress was considering easing travel restrictions to Cuba, and Minnesota food companies such as Hormel and Cargill were filling cash food orders that had been made legal under the 2000 Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Act.