POLITICS-US/CUBA: Trade Embargo Under Siege Like Never Before

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 21 2000 (IPS) - The 38-year-old US trade embargo against Cuba is under attack like never before.

In a stunning rebuke to the hard-line Cuban-American exile community and the Republican leadership, the House of Representatives voted Thursday night by substantial margins to bar the enforcement of restrictions on travel by US citizens to Cuba and to exempt sales of US food and medicine from the embargo.

The 301-116 vote on the latter provision was particularly striking and surprised even backers of the amendment. “We were overjoyed,” said Raul de Velasco, president of the Cuban Committee for Democracy (CCD), a Cuban-American group which favours dialogue with the government of Cuban President Fidel Castro. “This is the beginning of the end of the embargo,” he added.

Shortly after the House voted, the Senate approved an agricultural appropriations bill that would also permit Cuba to buy US food and medicine.

All of these measures must now be taken up by House-Senate conference committees to produce final versions on which both houses agree. That process, however, is often unpredictable, particularly on an issue as inflammatory as Cuba policy, so it is not yet clear whether the embargo will be substantially modified before Congress adjourns for the year in early October.

“None of this has been enacted into law yet,” said Emilio Vasquez of the Miami-based Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), the most powerful of the anti-Castro pressure groups active in Washington. “We may still be lucky enough so the whole thing is killed,” he told IPS by telephone from the annual CANF meeting in Miami Friday. “We are gearing for battle.”

Nonetheless, Thursday’s dramatic votes in the House marked the nadir of the CANF and the anti-Castro cause here.

They had been on the defensive on Capitol Hill for months as a result of their strenuous and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to prevent Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old boy found floating on an inner tube off the Florida coast last November, from being returned to Cuba with his father.

Elian and his family flew to Havana three weeks ago, less than one hour after the expiration of a court injunction that barred his departure until a succession of CANF-backed judicial appeals was completed.

“(Congressmen) had seen in a very graphic way the extremism (of the anti-Castro forces), and they were tired of being hostage to that,” said Geoff Thale, a Cuba policy analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), who linked Thursday’s votes directly to the Elian saga, as well as a two-year campaign by US agribusiness interests, humanitarian, and development groups to exempt medicine and food from the embargo.

The latter effort was led in the House by Republican Rep. George Nethercutt who, however, found himself strongly opposed by a Republican leadership which controlled the House’s agenda. After protracted negotiations last month, Nethercutt and the leadership agreed to a compromise measure which would permit sale of food and medicine but forbid any US government or private institution, such as banks, from financing such sales.

In addition, the compromise measure, which has yet to be voted on, would also tighten existing embargo restrictions on travel to Cuba by US citizens. Indeed, the price of an agreement on food sales proved so high, that a number of groups which had supported Nethercutt ended by denouncing it as a step backward, while Cuban- American lawmakers from Miami said it was better than no bill at all.

“This agreement is much better for us than current law,” said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Miami congresswoman. “No credits for Castro, and no tourism either.”

It is in that context that Thursday’s votes on amendments to the 2001 Treasury appropriations bill were so stunning.

Leading the way was an amendment by Republican Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who visited Cuba last year, to bar the Treasury Department from spending any money in enforcing the ban on travel to Cuba by US citizens. The amendment, which passed 241- 174, directly threatens the Nethercutt compromise which, if approved, would make it harder for citizens to go to Cuba.

The second amendment, sponsored by another Republican congressman, essentially amounted to Nethercutt’s original proposal. It cut off funding for enforcement of the ban on the sale of food and medicine to all embargoed states, including Cuba. The three-to-one margin of the vote surprised even supporters of the bill.

“The emperor has no clothes,” chortled CCD’s de Velasco after the votes. “For years now, the Republican leadership in Congress has claimed that there is no desire on the part of Congress to change its policy towards Cuba. Last night’s votes demonstrate that the Republican leadership based their position on special-interest politics, not reality.”

A third vote, on an amendment submitted by Democrat Charles Rangel, would have barred the enforcement of the trade embargo itself, effectively reversing 38 years of US policy. It was defeated, 174-241 – less than 70-vote margin which was roughly the same as the first attempt to lift food and medicine from the embargo just three years ago. “That should give little comfort to the CANF,” noted one Congressional aide.

Given the complexity of the legislative process, what happens next is somewhat uncertain. CANF and other hard-liners will probably try to force the Nethercutt compromise – and particularly its restrictions on travel and financing for food and medicine sales – through conference committees on the agricultural and Treasury appropriations bills.

But that may now prove much less tenable than before Thursday’s votes which showed strong support for both unrestricted travel and sales of food and medicine. “It’s clear our hand has been greatly strengthened by this,” said Thale. “The Nethercutt compromise clearly no longer reflects the will of the House, and he can push for a lot more.”

“What’s coming out now is the resentment against the (Republican) leadership and the Cuban-American lobby,” said Richard Nuccio, a former Cuba advisor to Clinton and now head of the Pell Center for International Relations at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island. Nuccio, however, is more sceptical that Congress alone can change policy in a concrete way without leadership from the executive branch.

“The basic message here is that if there was anyone in the White House who would like to lead us to a new Cuba policy, they will find Congress ready and willing,” he said. “But I don’t think there is such person right now, and we’re not likely to see one during this presidential campaign.”

“We’re moving into an awkward period where pieces of the embargo will be chipped away and enforcement will be loosened up,” he said, noting, however, that if Congress lifts the ban on tourism, the situation could be transformed dramatically.