POLITICS-US: Washington Eases Sanctions Against Cuba

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 20 1998 (IPS) - President Bill Clinton, reacting to Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Cuba two months ago, announced Friday that the United States would lift some of the sanctions imposed against Havana in the past four years.

The move – which top officials stressed did not signal an end to Washington’s 36-year-old trade embargo against Havana – would permit the resumption of humanitarian charter flights directly from the United States to Cuba.

It also would permit Cuban-American families to remit as much as 1,200 dollars a year to relatives in Cuba and simplify bureaucratic procedures for shipping medical supplies to the Caribbean nation. In addition, the administration will seek legislation to “meet humanitarian food needs on the island.”

Announcing details of the adminstration’s decision, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright underlined that these steps were being taken largely in response to the pope’s January visit during which he repeatedly criticised the embargo and called for an end to Cuba’s isolation.

Clinton wanted “to reach out to the people of Cuba to make their lives more tolerable,” Albright said, stressing that the new measures were designed primarily to address humanitarian problems rather than to signal any change toward the Communist government of President Fidel Castro.

“We will maintain economic pressure through the embargo and the Helms-Burton Act,” and the new measures “do not reflect a change in policy toward the Cuban government,” she added,

Albright said later, however, that there was a need for “fresh thinking” in Washington’s approach to Havana.

In a TV interview with Cable News Network (CNN) earlier Friday, Castro welcomed as “positive (and) constructive” reports that the administration had decided to take these measures, noting that they “would be helpful and conducive to a better climate between the United States and Cuba.”

But, Castro added, Havana would “study them fully” before making a final judgment.

Reaction in the United States outside the administration ranged from hard-line anti-Castro groups denouncing the move to anti- embargo forces, who offered qualified praise coupled with disappointment that Clinton had not gone further in response to the pope’s appeals.

“These are very small steps; the administration could hardly have done less,” said Wayne Smith, who headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana during the early 1980s and now promotes closer ties with Cuba as a senior analyst at the Center for International Policy here.

Smith, who headed a delegation to Cuba last week that included the recently retired NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. John Sheehan, said lifting the ban on humanitarian charter flights was the most important of the steps announced Friday but still was “no substitute for exempting food and medicine from the trade embargo,” as many lawmakers are now urging.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the fiercely anti- Castro Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) denounced the administration’s moves, especially the reestablishment of direct flights and remittances to Cuba.

“Such a unilateral change in policy would be an egregiously wrong signal to send at this time to the Castro dictatorship and the international community…,” said Jose Cardenas, CANF’s Washington director. “Castro has done nothing of substance to warrant any reevaluation of sanctions imposed on his regime.”

A spokesman for Sen. Jesse Helms, author of the 1996 Helms- Burton law which toughened and codified the U.S. trade embargo, also assailed the move, warning that it was a “serious mistake” for Clinton to act unilaterally at a time when Helms was working on a humanitarian food and medicine bill of his own.

The steps announced Friday effectively moved U.S. policy back to where it was in August 1994 when thousands of Cubans crowded into boats and rafts and headed for the United States. Concerned about the possibility of another major refugee crisis at the same time that Washington was trying to cope with an exodus from Haiti, Clinton immediately took steps to halt the outflow.

In a move that drew protests from the Cuban-American community, he unilaterally changed a generation-old policy by which Cubans rescued at sea were virtually assured asylum in the United States. At the same time, he suspended the ability of Cuban Americans to remit money to their relatives to Cuba and cut off charter flights between Florida and Havana.

By most accounts, Cuban-Americans were sending more than half-a- billion dollars a year in remittances to their family members on the island, making them a critical source of support for an economy that had already been devastated by the loss of aid and export markets after the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s. In fact, however, most analysts believe that the remittances have continued to flow to Cuba through third countries.

Eighteen months later, a new crisis in US-Cuban relations erupted when Cuban warplanes shot down two small aircraft manned by US-based anti-Castro activists close to Cuban air space. In retaliation, Clinton banned humanitarian flights of food, medicine and people and signed the Helms-Burton law which codified the trade embargo and imposed sanctions against foreign companies which invest in US-owned property in Cuba.

Since then, relations have been in the deep freeze. But the pope’s visit in January, which was followed by Cuba’s release of several hundred prisoners, created a new atmosphere which, according to most analysts, put Clinton on the spot.

Pope John Paul II pressed Albright for a gesture during a meeting at the Vatican earlier this month. The impact of the pope’s visit was also felt within the Cuban-American community where more- moderate voices have become increasingly outspoken in recent weeks. Most analysts believe the CANF, already reeling from the death in November of its powerful leader, Jorge Mas Canosa, has lost political clout.

A basic change in the political dynamics of the Cuba issue here is the growing debate over exempting food and medecine from the trade embargo. Helms and CANF have already split with even more hard-line Cuban-American lawmakers by proposing a bill that would permit Washington and U.S. companies to donate food and medicine to Cuba, provided that none goes through the Communist authorities.

But a broad coalition of group, ranging from the Chamber of Commerce to the Catholic Bishops, is backing another bill, which also enjoys bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, calls for effectively exempting food and medecine from the embargo altogether.

In what has become a typical pattern regarding its approach to highly charged foreign-policy issues, Albright suggested that the administration hopes to find some middle ground.