SUNS 4352 Wednesday 13 January 1999

United States: Lessons from offer of "crumbs" to Cuba



Washington, Jan 11 (IPS/Jim Lobe) -- Last week's decision by President Bill Clinton to reject calls by top Republican, business and other establishment figures in the United States to undertake a review of Washington's nearly 40-year hostility toward Cuba underscores a number of realities about U.S. politics today.

At its most general level, it shows once again that big business, which has actively lobbied since the mid-1990s for lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Havana, still has limited influence on U.S. foreign policy, even in this age of globalisation and geo-economics.

At a more specific level, the decision illustrates once again the extreme caution of the Clinton administration in making any foreign-policy decisions which could have electoral repercussions.

And now, with Clinton unable to run for re-election in the year 2000, it appears that this caution has been passed on to Vice President Al Gore, who reportedly played a key role in making the decision.

At its most specific level, Clinton's rejection of what has become a mainstream consensus - that U.S. interests 10 years after the end of the Cold War are best furthered by engaging Havana rather than isolating it - suggests that the impeachment trial soon to get underway in the U.S. Senate may have made the president even more risk-averse than his already timid record of the last six years would indicate.

Before last week, the momentum for at least ordering a major review of U.S. policy toward Cuba seemed virtually irresistible, at least among mainstream U.S. opinion.

Twenty-four senators, including 16 Republicans, had signed a letter calling on Clinton to name an independent bipartisan commission to undertake such a review, which would have centred on the advisability of maintaining the 37-year-old trade embargo against Havana.

The idea had been originally been advanced by former top policy-makers with solid Republican credentials, including former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Lawrence Eagleburger, and Ronald Reagan's national security adviser and defence secretary, Frank Carlucci.

The mostly Republican business community - organised into a lobby group called USA-Engage - had already lined up behind any proposal to ease the embargo.

Eager to take advantage of new opportunities for tourism and a promising market for U.S. food exports, U.S. companies have been arguing for several years now that Washington's policy is anachronistic and self-defeating.

And last week, the quintessential foreign policy establishment institution, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), was set to publish its own report based on the work of a task force which, while "bipartisan," was in fact heavily weighted toward the right side of the political spectrum.

Chaired by two former Republican assistant secretaries of state for Inter-American affairs, the task force did not specifically address the creation of an independent commission. But it made a number of policy recommendations amounting to a substantial revision of U.S. policy.
These ranged from lifting the limits on the number of visits Cuban-Americans can make to Cuba to scrapping the embargo on food sales to the island, engaging the Cuban military on a range of
confidence-building and cooperative measures, and even permitting U.S. companies to do business on the island under specific conditions.

Clinton not only turned down the more far-reaching measures recommended by the CFR, but also rejected outright the idea of forming a commission. Instead, he announced several modest measures - the New York Times called them "useful tinkering" - designed, he said, to help
the Cuban people, while weakening the Cuban state.

These included lifting some limits on the amount of money U.S. citizens and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can send to individuals and NGOs in Cuba and increasing the number of U.S. cities from which Cuban-Americans can fly direct to their homeland.

Other measures announced by Clinton include increasing scientific, educational, cultural and athletic exchanges - beginning with holding two exhibition baseball games between the Cuban national team and the Baltimore Orioles - and permitting US businesses to sell food and other
goods to Cuban NGOs and the tiny group of private farmers and restaurateurs on the island.

"Crumbs" is how Cuba's Economy Minister characterised the measures in an assessment that was echoed by many Cuba analysts here.

"This just affects things around the margins," said Geoffrey Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), while Wayne Smith, head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana in the early 1980's, declared them "very timid, as one has come to expect with this administration."

The backers of the commission proposal were particularly disappointed. "It's a lost opportunity for Americans to review a policy of basic isolationism," said Virginia Senator John Warner, the prime Senate and Republican sponsor of the idea. Warner, a former Navy Secretary who remains close to the military top brass at the Pentagon, had worked hard with colleagues from his agricultural state, including some of the most right-wing Congressmen, to persuade Clinton he would be safe from
any partisan attacks should he adopt the proposal.

"If ever Clinton wanted Republican cover for a major policy change, he had it on Cuba," said one disappointed Congressional aide, who noted that Clinton had also taken years to normalise relations with Vietnam despite outspoken support for the move by senior Republicans, including
most of the Vietnam War veterans serving in Congress. "He just chickened out."

It appears that Clinton and Gore, the frontrunner in the 2000 presidential race, balked at taking bolder action after the zealously anti-Castro Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) and its
supporters in Congress launched an all-out campaign against the commission proposal in November.

While the CANF has been badly weakened by the death in November 1997 of its founder, Jorge Mas Canosa, Clinton and Gore clearly believed that its diehard loyalists, who are concentrated in south Florida and in a handful of pockets of New Jersey, are still capable of causing major political damage to any candidate who could be seen as supporting major policy changes toward Havana.

Under the U.S. electoral system, the presidential candidate with the most votes in a state receives all of its electoral votes. New Jersey and Florida are among the 10 states with the most votes in the country, although Florida has not gone for a Democratic presidential candidate in more than 20 years.

In addition, one of the CANF's most stalwart proponents, New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli, had positioned himself as one of Clinton's most combative and staunchest defenders in the impeachment process. Faced with an uncertain fate in the upper chamber, Clinton may have felt that he needed all the senators he could get.