Assemblyman Andrew Goodell, R-Chautauqua County, hit the nail on the head when he said Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s late-April trip to Cuba was “all show and no go in terms of meaningful progress.”

The trip did result in an agreement between the Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Cuban Center of Molecular Immunology to study the Cuban center’s potential vaccine for lung cancer, an agreement for Infor Global Solutions Inc. to sell health care management software in Cuba and an agreement for the State University at New York to establish a Cuba lecture series. This week, JetBlue officials announced the airline will begin flights from New York City to Havana.

We would hope the Cuba trip could benefit area agricultural producers with a new market for their produce or meat or perhaps a new market for area manufacturers. It is understandable that such work takes time, but it certainly hasn’t been articulated how a trip to Cuba benefits any of the 134,000 people in Chautauqua County. At best, Cuomo’s trip was a lot of show and very little go in terms of meaningful progress.

That doesn’t mean these sort of trade missions are always a waste of time.

We have seen the difficulty of trying to attract new jobs to the area when our efforts are focused inside the continental United States. Too often, Chautauqua County has been the loser in such trade-offs. Our sister paper in Wheeling, W.V., recently wrote of its governor’s trip to visit a state development office in Nagoya, Japan, opened nearly 25 years ago. That state’s relationship with the Japanese government has resulted in West Virginia being home to a Wheeling-Nishin Steel plant and a Toyota plant with the possibility of new development from a Japanese firm as part of Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s trip. It’s worth asking why New York doesn’t have trade offices in places where business is booming and why marketing New York to those sort of areas isn’t a bigger part of the Start-Up NY plan.

The problem isn’t so much that Cuomo is spending time on trade trips – it’s that the governor is spending time on trade trips that are difficult for local development officials outside of New York’s biggest cities or counties to build on or which don’t have an articulated benefit to local residents.

If New York is going to spend money on trade trips, it should make sure to spend its time and money as wisely as possible. For once, use West Virginia as an example.