CUBA-U.S.: Clinton surrenders U.S. policy to Florida Cubans

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 29 1996 (IPS) - Five days after Cuban MiG warplanes shot down two small U.S. planes, President Bill Clinton appears to have surrendered his Cuba policy of quiet detente to the hard-line Cuban exile community and its Congressional allies.

By signing on to the controversial Helms-Burton bill, which his administration last September warned would “damage prospects for a peaceful transition in Cuba,” Clinton has adopted a logic that could make any transition much more violent.

“If you take the position that the only course is confrontation, then you have a much more dangerous dynamic,” says Wayne Smith, a Cuba expert who headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana 15 years ago.

In supporting the bill, Clinton has also given Congress a permanent veto on modifying the 36-year-old U.S. trade embargo against the Caribbean island — a surrender of presidential foreign policy-making authority that has no recent precedent. Until now, the trade embargo was based only on an executive order.

And by agreeing to provisions in the bill aimed at discouraging foreign investment in Cuba, the president now appears headed for new trade tensions with some of Washington’s closest allies.

Canada has already given notice that it believes those provisions, if implemented, would threaten international investment treaties, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and expose U.S. companies to retaliation.

But these considerations were apparently swept aside when Clinton decided late Wednesday night to support the Helms-Burton bill, named for its chief co-sponsors, the ultra-right-wing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, and Rep. Dan Burton.

Among other measures, the bill will permit U.S. citizens to sue in federal court foreign companies and individuals with an interest in commercial property that was expropriated by President Fidel Castro’s government after the 1959 Revolution. Until now, the administration had strenuously opposed this provision on the grounds that it would spur a flood of litigation that could overwhelm the courts here.

Clinton had also warned tha~ U.S. allies, like Canada and the European Union (EU), whose businesses have invested in Cuba can be expected to strongly reject the unilateral assertion of U.S. law beyond its territory. In a letter to Congress last September, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said that provision would “be hard to defend under international law.”

In its one concession to Clinton, Congressional negotiators agreed to grant him the power to waive this section of the bill for periods of up to six months if he finds it “necessary to the “national interest” to do so.

But Clinton cannot avoid implementing any other part of the bill, which, for example, bans the issuance of U.S. visas to the heads of companies which “traffic” in expropriated property. Their family members are also to be excluded.

It also requires Washington to cut aid to Russia by the same amount that Moscow pays Cuba for the use of an intelligence base on the island — about 200 million dollars. Similarly, any U.S. aid recipient would see its aid cut by the amount it provides Cuba to help it complete the controversial Juragua nuclear-power plant.

But the bill’s crowning touch is its codification of the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. If any administration wants to ease the embargo to encourage certain policy changes in Havana, it will have to seek Congressional approval, according to the bill.

Until now, Clinton has promised that reforms in Cuba would be met by “carefully calibrated” responses from Washington, mainly in the form of measures designed to ease the embargo.

“That’s now out the window,” says Smith, who notes that under the new legislation, “there can’t be any carefully calibrated responses.”

That was Helms’ conclusion as well. “The only way the embargo can ever be lifted is if Fidel Castro leaves Cuba,” chortled Marc Theissen, Helms’ press spokesman.

U.S. official agree. “Under this bill, we can’t even help any transition process,” says one. “Without any carrots to offer, we’re going to be sitting on the sidelines, at best, during any possible transition.”

But Smith and others believe a much darker scenario may now be in the offing. The bill, according to Rep. Lee Hamilton, the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives International Relations Committee, “moves U.S. policy in exactly the wrong direction.”

“By isolating the Cuban people, (the bill) will increase the risk of violent upheaval (in Cuba), and increase the risk of a massive flow of refugees to U.S. shores,” he warned Wednesday night.

Smith believes the danger is more immediate. “I would be very surprised if we didn’t see new incidents in the Straits of Florida, provoked by the exiles with the hope of forcing the administration into military action,” he says, noting that Washington has yet to announce concrete measures to curb the ‘Brothers to the Rescue’ group which lost the two planes last Saturday.

Since January, when a Brothers’ plane dropped leaflets over downtown Havana, Cuba had warned Washington repeatedly that such aircraft would be shot down if they continued to invade Cuban airspace. Set up originally to search the Straits for Cuban rafters, the Brothers operation, which is led by a veteran of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, has engaged in increasingly provocative behaviour since last year’s Cuban-U.S. immigration accord.

The Brothers and other anti-Castro groups have already announced their intention to send aircraft and a small flotilla of boats to the shootdown site for a memorial ceremony this weekend. The White House announced Thursday that it was sending Coast Guard vessels and aircraft to the area to escort the participants and to ensure that they do not invade Cuban waters and airspace.

Clinton also issued an emergency order to ensure that any U.S. citizen or group which invades Cuban waters or airspace without permission will be “subject to the maximum penalties permitted by law.”

But, notes Smith, this is unlikely to deter the Brothers and similar groups in the future. Indeed, one Brothers pilot and Bay of Pigs veteran, Esteban Bobo, observed to the Christian Science Monitor this week that his opposition to Castro was not based on “civil disobedience. We haven’t changed our mind. Change has to be through war,” he said.