Posted at 12:14 p.m. EDT Sunday, June 18, 2000
Backers of easing sanctions on Cuba make run at defense bill
WASHINGTON -- (AP) -- Senators wanted to know from the expert on international terrorism if any of the seven countries the United States accuses of exporting terror had improved its record. The answer: Cuba.
That may have surprised those in Congress who insist on preserving the four-decades-old trade embargo against the communist country 90 miles from Florida.
But the response from Paul Bremer, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism and the State Department's former top counterterrorism official, at a hearing was not news to a small but growing band of lawmakers seeking to normalize trade and other relations with Cuba.
A proposal senators plan to consider Tuesday would establish a commission that would, among other things, evaluate whether the United States should continue to view Cuba as a military threat.
For supporters of the amendment to a massive defense authorization bill, the answer comes easily: No.
``We've got to face the reality when it comes to Cuba,'' said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
``If we can do it in Vietnam, if we can do it in Korea, if we can do it in China, places where we've had real hostility, we ought to be able to do it in a country like Cuba,'' Daschle said.
The amendment's sponsor, Sen. Christopher Dodd, and others hope to translate new American interest in Cuba generated by the Elian Gonzalez case into growing support in Congress for dismantling U.S. barriers against Cuba.
The push for closer ties with Cuba, however, runs right into the political reality of an election year in which Congress and the White House are up for grabs.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., gives a ``big thumbs down'' to Dodd's proposed commission, Lott spokesman John Czwartacki said.
``Basically, he doesn't want to take any steps which would lead to increased trade with a despot in Cuba like Fidel Castro,'' Czwartacki said.
Dodd, D-Conn., recognizes the long odds.
``I'm stunned, in a way, that even this idea has provoked the kind of opposition it has,'' Dodd said.
The 12-member commission would examine the military threat issue and a range of other U.S.-Cuban topics and would make recommendations to the next president in the spring of 2001.
One of the strongest supporters will vote against it -- but only because Sen. John Warner, R-Va., does not want the defense bill cluttered with more amendments.
Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has advocated such a commission for more than two years.
Does he believe Cuba is a military threat to the United States? ``I do not. I don't know that I ever did,'' he said in an interview.
``The one thing positive about the whole Elian Gonzalez affair is that the whole of America woke up to something -- that our policy hasn't dislodged Castro,'' Warner said. ``Yet our whole relationship with the hemisphere here is affected by this war of words between the United States and Cuba.''
Public sentiment is slowly changing and softening toward Cuba, contends Craig Johnstone, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's international division.
``I think the Senate, even before the Elian case, demonstrated it was ready to ease the embargo,'' Johnstone said.
He cited last year's overwhelming Senate passage of a measure to ease the embargo for food and medicine, which the House later rejected.
The House Appropriations Committee sought to revive the food-and-medicine waiver earlier this year. Anti-Castro forces have blocked a floor vote.
While Johnstone realizes the Dodd amendment may not pass, ``I think the purpose of it is to highlight the fact that we still have an embargo. As Al Gore found out, the more attention there is to the Cuba issue, the more likely people will understand the embargo isn't accomplishing what it was set up to do.''
With an eye on disproportionate political clout of Florida's Cuban-American community, Gore broke with President Clinton and sided with Elian's Florida relatives and said a family court should decide the boy's fate.
The most outspoken critics of the Castro regime dismiss Dodd's proposal.
``I know that this is a serious issue, but his proposal is so transparently biased that it's silly,'' said Sen. Connie Mack, R-Fla. ``It's so blatantly designed to determine a particular outcome in a presidential election year that it's silly.''
Dodd sees promoting close ties with Cuba as inevitable.
``All over the globe people are making an effort in this new millennium to reach out and find a new basis on which to have a relationship, and it's long overdue that we tried the same thing in this hemisphere, and specifically with regard to Cuba,'' Dodd said.
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