I do not know: I have just spent some time with this, and it seems that at least in current U++ trunk, everything is already fixed. Suggested call is included in "Open" and MySql performs character conversions as needed.
Practically the only thing you have to satisfy is to make sure that your table (and table column, as crazy MySql allows definition of encoding on per-column basis) has the correct encoding. It does not even have to be utf-8, it just have to support characters that you are trying to push there...