Two firms signed a deal Thursday for the first commercial exports in half a century from Cuba to the United States, a new step in the countries' historic rapprochement.
Cuban company CubaExport signed an agreement to sell charcoal to US firm Coabana Trading for $420 a tonne, the communist island's state newspaper Granma said.
Although a nearly 55-year US trade embargo on Cuba remains in place, the exports are authorized under exceptional measures approved by outgoing US President Barack Obama.
It is a key step in the gradual normalizing of ties that he and Cuban President Raul Castro launched in late 2014.
A first shipment of 40 tonnes of "marabu" vegetable charcoal for burning, made from a local hardwood tree originating in Africa, is due for delivery on January 18, Granma said online.
The Republican-controlled US Congress is reluctant to lift the full embargo on the communist island, whose government is branded a dictatorship by critics.
But Obama, who hands over office to Donald Trump on January 20, managed to ease the trade restrictions to allow certain products from private cooperative Cuban farms to be exported.
"This is a wide-reaching agreement for relations between the two countries," the president of Coabana Trading, Scott Gilbert, told reporters after signing the deal in Havana.
"It represents another plank in the bridge between the United States and Cuba."
CubaExport exports between 40,000 and 80,000 tonnes of vegetable charcoal a year, mostly to Europe, Granma said.
Ashen and grave, President Castro told the nation in an unexpected late night broadcast on state television that Fidel Castro had died and would be cremated on Saturday.
There would now be several days of national mourning on the island.
Raul Castro ended the announcement by shouting the revolutionary slogan: "Towards victory, always!"
Barring the occasional newspaper column, Fidel Castro had essentially been retired from political life for some time, the BBC's Will Grant in Havana reports.
In April, Fidel Castro gave a rare speech on the final day of the country's Communist Party congress.
He acknowledged his advanced age but said Cuban communist concepts were still valid and the Cuban people "will be victorious".
Throughout the Cold War, Fidel Castro was Washington's bete noire.
An accomplished tactician on the battlefield, he and his small army of guerrillas overthrew the military leader Fulgencio Batista in 1959 to widespread popular support.
Within two years of taking power, he declared the revolution to be Marxist-Leninist in nature and allied the island nation firmly to the Soviet Union.
Yet, despite the constant threat of a US invasion as well as the long-standing economic embargo on the island, Castro managed to maintain a communist revolution in a nation just 90 miles (145km) off the coast of Florida.
Despised by his critics as much as he was revered by his followers, he outlasted ten US presidents and defied scores of attempts on his life by the CIA.
