Rifts in Hard Line on Cuba
But Lawmakers Who Question Sanctions Can Face 'Bad Day'
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Conservative Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) has made only one major
detour during his three-term focus on domestic economic issues. Following
two trips to Cuba--one in 1997 and one last October--he proposed easing
a 40-year policy of unilateral sanctions he has concluded accomplish little
for either the Cuban or American people.
Cuban American members have complained, he said, and he has gotten a
few anonymous telephone calls threatening his political future. But for
the
most part, his efforts to push new legislation about Cuba have been
ignored by his House colleagues.
Sanford's brief foray into foreign policy is instructive on at least two
levels.
It is an example of the small but growing number of unlikely holes being
punched in the hard line on Cuba. Last year, a number of farm-state
Republicans, led by conservative Sen. John D. Ashcroft (Mo.), joined with
traditional liberals to win a Senate vote to end unilateral U.S. embargoes
on food shipments to Cuba and elsewhere. Few months pass without a
delegation of American legislators of all stripes traveling to the communist
bastion.
But Sanford's experience is equally illustrative of why the hard line is
likely
to hold for some time to come. Where it counts--among those who control
the business of Congress, especially in the House--there is steadfast
opposition to change. That being the case, many members who rarely give
a passing thought to Cuba have concluded that only knaves or fools stick
their heads above the parapet.
"You know that if you kick the Cuba issue, you're going to have a bad
day," said former representative David Skaggs (D-Colo.), who clashed
with the hard line on Havana, and paid for it with lost funding for his
district. "Other than to about 10 members, it doesn't matter that much.
[But] when there are a few people who will die for the issue, and nobody
else gets anywhere close to that, they can have their way."
The frequent suggestion that those who lead the pro-sanctions movement
are emotion-charged beyond reason infuriates Rep. Bob Menendez
(D-N.J.), one of three Cuban Americans in Congress. He compared the
passion of Cubans in this country to that of Irish Americans or Jewish
Americans who seek to influence foreign policy.
For those "on our side," he said, keeping the strongest pressure on Cuba
until its repressive government changes "goes to the core of their values--a
belief in democracy and human rights." Even Sanford's modest recent
proposal to end restrictions on American travel to the island, he said,
means "money for Cuba" and delays the day of reckoning for 73-year-old
President Fidel Castro.
On the other side many liberals, and the occasional conservative
iconoclast, have been drawn to equally traditional arguments. Led most
prominently by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Jose E.
Serrano (D-N.Y.), they believe that years of U.S. economic and
diplomatic isolation have hurt the Cuban people and given Castro a rallying
cry, and that intransigence on Cuba is inconsistent with friendly policies
toward equally repressive communist regimes in Vietnam and China.
After years of losing battles, their numbers have recently been bolstered
with help from some of the country's most powerful economic forces.
Major agribusiness companies, and organizations including the American
Farm Bureau and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, oppose unilateral
sanctions overall and see Cuba as one of several potential new venues for
U.S. goods and investment. Their pressure on members to change their
views and their votes has met with some success, most prominently with
last summer's sanctions-lifting vote in the Senate.
"I've always said that the embargo is going to end when Wall Street wants
it to end," said Serrano. "What has surprised me now is what I would call
moderate to conservative Democrats and Republicans who see the need to
have their farmers sell food."
Serrano and others believe that the hard line may finally have overreached
with the Elian Gonzalez case. The GOP leadership strongly supported and
predicted quick passage of measures to make the shipwrecked boy a U.S.
citizen and prevent the Clinton administration from sending him home. But
a significant number of members have signaled that they they think Elian
should be reunited with his father in Cuba, and the bills are languishing.
The general public pays little attention to Cuba issues, said Skaggs, who
joined the Aspen Institute after his 1998 retirement from Congress. But
with the Elian case, he said, the public may have realized that the
hard-liners are "out of sync" with their values. "Maybe this will start
to
contribute to some diminishment of their authority generally on Cuba
matters."
Menendez disagrees. "Those who believe Elian is a weather vane for
broader implications in Congress are mistaken."
The forces arrayed on both sides of the wider Cuba debate are
formidable, and passions run high on both sides. Within the Hispanic
Caucus, opinions on Cuba diverge so widely that members have agreed
not to discuss it. Cuban-born Miami Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, the only two Republican Hispanics in Congress, resigned
from the caucus in 1997 over its failure to support isolation of Cuba.
In the middle stands the Clinton administration, which tends toward
normalization, but sees no political advantage in a unilateral move toward
Cuba. While supporting the legislative hard line, it works within the margins
of executive prerogatives to narrow the sanctions restrictions.
Menendez, the New York-born child of Cuban immigrants, says he is a
frequent adviser to the administration on Cuba issues. His New Jersey
district includes the largest concentration of Cuban Americans outside
of
southern Florida, and he is the only Latino in a congressional leadership
position, as vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus.
While Menendez and like-minded Democrats from states with strong
Cuban American constituencies, including Sens. Bob Graham (Fla.) and
Robert G. Torricelli (N.J.), lobby colleagues on their side of the aisle,
Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen have had a somewhat easier time
persuading GOP House members to support continuing sanctions and
isolation of the Castro regime.
Their efforts are aided by Diaz-Balart's seat on the Rules Committee,
which decides which legislation will reach the House floor, and strong
sanctions support from Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) and other GOP
leaders. Together they can and do assure that proposed legislation like
Sanford's is dead on arrival.
Money and lobbying muscle flows freely to both sides of the debate. But
for years, the unchallenged big gun on Cuba policy has been the
Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation, which strongly backs
the hard line.
A 1997 report by the Center for Public Integrity identified the foundation
as not only "the most potent voice on U.S. policy toward Cuba," but
"dollar for dollar, arguably the most effective" lobbying force in
Washington. From its 1981 founding until 1997, the report said, the
foundation funneled approximately $3.2 million into the U.S. political
system. The foundation has financed much of the attempt by Elian
Gonzalez's Miami relatives to keep him in this country.
It claims credit for the current pillars of sanctions policy--Radio and
TV
Marti, a $28 million-a-year taxpayer-financed system broadcasting into
Cuba, along with the embargo-tightening Cuban Democracy Act in 1992
and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act.
The foundation tends to remember its friends and punish its enemies
without regard to party affiliation. Florida and New Jersey members, along
with supporters in positions of power, have traditionally been among the
biggest recipients of donations from foundation individuals and the
organization's Free Cuba PAC.
But others who are less visibly associated with the foundation's causes
are
also remembered, such as House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt
(D-Mo.) and Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy (R.I.), chairman of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee, who has been in the forefront of calls
to keep Elian Gonzalez in Miami. The two top Senate recipients so far in
the current campaign cycle are Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and
Charles S. Robb (D-Va.).
Those who antagonize the foundation can expect a quick response. The
morning after Skaggs succeeded in temporarily killing funds for TV Marti
in July 1993, he was confronted by an angry Diaz-Balart who, Skaggs said
in an impassioned floor speech that afternoon, threatened "that if I followed
through with my plans, he would do all he could to go after everything
he
could find that was important to me."
That same day, Diaz-Balart used a parliamentary "point of order" to ax
millions in federal funds for Skagg's Colorado district, as the foundation
was faxing a gloating press release detailing the maneuver, and the reason
for it, to every major newspaper in the state.
"We only go after people who come after us," Jose Cardenas, the
foundation's Washington director, said in a recent interview.
While acknowledging that "there are [now] some different dynamics in the
debate," Cardenas said, "there is a big difference between issuing press
releases that you want U.S. policy to change, going down on these
pilgrimages to Havana and being wined and dined by the dictator, and
actually effecting policy change."
Cardenas dismissed purported changes of heart on sanctions by Ashcroft
and others. "He's got an agricultural state and a very tough race against
a
popular governor," he said of the Missourian. The Senate vote "was more
a bone to the farm lobby. . . . I think he knew it was not going to go
anywhere in the House."
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