Elian, are you listening?
In Blow to Bush, Senate Votes to Ease Cuba Travel Limits
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
Published: October 23, 2003
ASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — In a firm rebuke to President Bush over Cuba policy, the Senate voted overwhelmingly today to ease travel restrictions on Americans seeking to visit the island.
The 59-to-38 vote came less than two weeks after President Bush, in a Rose Garden ceremony, announced that he would tighten the travel ban in an attempt to halt illegal tourism there.
The House passed a similar measure by a wide margin on Sept. 9. So today's vote placed the president and Republican Congressional leaders uncomfortably on a collision course, leaving an angry White House threatening to veto an important spending bill and a growing number of lawmakers from both parties demanding an overhaul of the American sanctions regime against Havana.
The vote also highlighted a widening split between farm-state Republicans, who oppose trade sanctions in general or are eager to increase sales to Cuba, and Cuban-American leaders, whom the White House views as essential to the president's political strength in Florida.
Several influential Republican senators voted against the president, including John Warner of Virginia, the chairman of the armed services committee, and Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of the intelligence committee, as well as numerous conservatives from rural states, including Senators James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Sam Brownback of Kansas and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.
Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican who co-sponsored the amendment, criticized what he called an American "stranglehold" on Cuba, a nation of 11 million located within 100 miles of United States shores. The decades-old travel ban, he said, merely deepens the misery of Cubans without providing fresh ideas to the Marxist-led nation.
"Unilateral sanctions stop not just the flow of goods, but the flow of ideas," Senator Enzi said. "Ideas of freedom and democracy are the keys to positive change in any nation."
The White House countered that allowing unfettered American travel to Cuba would provide the government of President Fidel Castro with an economic bonanza, allowing him to cover up his shortcomings as a repressive dictator.
"It is vitally important to maintain these sanctions and restrictions," said one senior administration official. Their purpose, he said, "is to prevent unlicensed tourism in Cuba, which provides economic resources — American dollars — to the Castro regime, while doing nothing to help the Cuban people."
The official said the president's advisers would recommend that he veto the bill if it emerges from a conference committee.
President Bush made his own case for the restrictions on Oct. 10, when he pledged to step up enforcement of the travel ban, by intensifying inspections of travelers and shipments to and from Cuba. The Department of Homeland Security immediately announced that it would direct "intelligence and investigative resources" to identify travelers or businesses that circumvent the sanctions against Cuba.
Mr. Bush's announcement, which included the creation of a commission to plan for a post-Castro Cuba, represented the first substantive response to a mounting outcry among some Cuban exile groups over Mr. Castro's imprisonment of about 75 Cuban dissidents last spring. In addition, some Cuban American leaders had voiced outrage of the administration's decision to repatriate 12 Cubans accused of hijacking a government boat. |
