POLITICS-U.S.: Bush Vows to Maintain Cuba Embargo

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May 20 2002 (IPS) - One week after Cuban President Fidel Castro hosted former U.S. leader Jimmy Carter, President George W. Bush on Monday ruled out any easing of Washington’s 42-year-old trade embargo without far-reaching political and economic reform.

In a White House speech which he is also scheduled to deliver at a fund-raising gala Monday evening in the anti-Castro bastion of Miami, Bush pledged to stand against growing pressure in Congress to ease the embargo. Much of that is coming from Republican lawmakers of farm states eager to export to Cuba.

“Without major steps by Cuba to open up its political system and its economic system, trade with Cuba will not help the Cuban people,” Bush declared.

“It’s important to understand, without political reform, without economic reform, trade with Cuba will merely enrich Fidel Castro and his cronies,” he said.

The speech, timed to coincide with the centenary of Cuba’s independence from Spanish rule and U.S. occupation, was greeted with enthusiasm by anti-Castro hard-liners and far right Republicans and with groans virtually everywhere else.

“This administration is determined to pander to the right-wing exiles in Florida,” said Wayne Smith, Washington’s top diplomat in Havana in the early 1980s. Smith, now with the Washington-based Center for International Policy (CIP), noted that Bush’s brother Jeb faces a tough re-election fight as Florida’s governor next fall.

Monday’s speech was as notable as much for what it did not say as for what it did.

Bush failed to even mention the recent charge by a senior State Department official, under-secretary for arms control and international security, John Bolton, that Cuba had developed “a limited offensive biological weapons” capability and was sharing the technology with “other rogue states”.

The charge, vehemently denied by Havana, contradicted recent public intelligence estimates and created a storm on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers demanded evidence. The storm intensified when Carter, after arriving in Cuba, disclosed that administration officials who briefed him in advance of his trip did not mention the issue.

Bolton’s boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell, also backed away from the charge, which now appears to have been an unauthorised foray by Bolton, one of the administration’s most right-wing figures, to raise tensions that might overshadow Carter’s visit.

“They didn’t have any evidence,” said Smith, who wrote a lengthy and categorical rebuttal of Bolton’s charges. “They made themselves look like fools.”

Remarkably, Bush also failed to mention Carter – the first U.S. ex-president to visit Cuba since its revolution – even though the former president’s championship of human rights, political reform and Cuban dissidents during his trip gained unprecedented exposure in the Cuban media itself.

Cuban television broadcast live Carter’s address at the University of Havana last Tuesday and ‘Granma’, the official Communist Party newspaper, reprinted the uncensored text of the speech two days later.

The former president met with many dissidents while on the island.

In addition to calling for an end to the U.S. embargo as a necessary first step in normalising ties between the two nations, Carter urged Castro to ease restrictions on free speech and association. He also endorsed a recently submitted petition signed by some 11,000 Cubans that calls on the government to hold a referendum on expanding civil liberties and freeing political prisoners.

Under Cuba’s constitution, petitions signed by more than 10,000 citizens are to be submitted to the electorate. But the Castro government has not yet declared how it will treat the petition, called the Varela Project.

Without mentioning Carter’s role in publicising the Project, Bush cited it for his own purposes Monday, insisting that if a referendum is permitted, “it can be a prelude, a beginning for real change in Cuba”.

But Bush put greater focus on next year’s scheduled elections for Cuba’s national assembly, which will provide the “opportunity to offer Cuban voters the substance of democracy, not its hollow, empty forms”, he said.

“If Cuba’s government takes all the necessary steps to ensure that the 2003 elections are certifiably free and fair, and if Cuba also begins to adopt meaningful market-based reforms, then – and only then – I will work the United States Congress to ease the ban on trade and travel between our two countries,” he said, in what top aides described as a “roadmap” to normalisation.

Until then, said Bush, Washington will take several steps designed to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance for the Cuban people and build up civil society groups independent of the state.

The president will ask Congress to approve money for scholarships in the United States for Cuban students and professionals who are building non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Cuba and for family members of political prisoners there. He pledged to modernise Radio and TV Marti, Miami-based government operations that broadcast to Cuba, so Havana cannot interfere with their signals.

At the same time, the administration will enforce the existing travel and trade embargoes and fight efforts to lift a ban on U.S. financing for Cuban purchases of U.S. food.

Two years ago, Congress exempted food from the U.S. embargo but, at the insistence of the Republican leadership in Congress, it banned any U.S. government or private financing of food exports to Cuba, forcing Havana to pay for the goods in cash. After Hurricane Michelle in autumn 2000, Cuba bought some 20 million dollars in U.S. food, an amount that has since risen to almost 100 million dollars.

Those sales have greatly boosted the interest of U.S. food exporters, who now are pushing legislation that would permit U.S. financing of exports to Cuba.

Last week, a newly created ‘Cuba Working Group’ of 40 lawmakers equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, announced a nine-point plan to ease the embargo and promote bilateral trade and travel.