THE UNITED STATES AND CUBA: STRAINED ENGAGEMENT

William M. LeoGrande
School of Public Affairs
American University
Washington, DC
[email protected]

Prepared for Presentation at the Latin American Studies Association 2004 Congress, Las Vegas,
Nevada, October 7-9, 2004.

©All rights reserved.

 THE UNITED STATES AND CUBA: STRAINED ENGAGEMENT

William M. LeoGrande
School of Public Affairs
Amerian University
Washington, DC

At each other’s throats for the past 45 years, Cuba and the United States remain, in the

words of a former head of the American Interest Section in Havana, “the closest of enemies.”1

Since 1898, with one exception, no relationship has been more important for Cuba than its

relationship with the United States. From the Bay of Pigs to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuba’s

partnership with the Moscow took Washington’s place. But when the Cold War ended, so too

did the geographically implausible triangular relationship between Cuba and the two

superpowers, leaving Cuba alone once again to confront what José Martí called the “turbulent

and brutal North.”2

Since George W. Bush became president, the Cuban and U.S. governments have not had

much direct interaction, other than trading invective. Like hostile next-door neighbors who have

built a tall fence between their properties, they rarely see one another, but delight in hurling

insults back and forth. This is hardly a new development. Although Presidents Gerald Ford and

Jimmy Carter sought to normalize relations with Cuba in the 1970s, their efforts faltered over

Cuba’s support for liberation struggles in Africa. No U.S. president since has made a serious

effort to negotiate normalization. With U.S. foreign policy adopting a more aggressive posture

toward adversaries under the mantle of the war on terrorism, U.S. Cuban-relations appear

destined to get worse before they got better. Yet despite the persistent hostility between the two

countries, the relationship is by no means static. The end of the Cold War set off a cascade of
significant changes in U.S. interests, Cuban interests, and the domestic political dynamics that

shape policy on both sides of the Florida Straits.

Before 1991, Cuba’s partnership with the Soviet Union and ideological antagonism

toward the United States made it a security issue for Washington. Aiding revolutionaries in

Latin America, sending troops to Africa, denouncing global capitalism in the Nonaligned

Movement--at every juncture, Cuba stood opposed to U.S. foreign policy. With the collapse of

the Soviet Union, however, any plausible Cuban threat evaporated. The troops came home from

Africa, Cuba stopped promoting revolution in Latin America, military ties to Moscow were

severed, and even the Russian intelligence facility at Lourdes was closed. Castro continued to

denounce global capitalism, especially as manifested in U.S. proposals for a Free Trade Area of

the Americas (FTAA), but Cuba was no longer seen as a model by the underdeveloped world.

By the mid-1990s, virtually all U.S. security concerns about Cuba were gone, yet Washington’s

antagonism remained undiminished.

As the security issue faded from the U.S. agenda, the promotion of democracy rose to

replace it. The idea that U.S. foreign policy should promote democracy has a long pedigree, but

it was eclipsed during most of the Cold War by the realist argument that security and the balance

of power were preeminent concerns. When the end of the Cold War made containment

irrelevant as an organizing principle for foreign policy, democracy promotion emerged as a

consensus alternative. George Bush Snr, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all embraced this

new aim, though not (as China policy demonstrated) to the exclusion of more traditional

economic and security interests. In Cuba, however, where security concerns were nil and

potential economic interests modest, the promotion of democracy became a key element in the

revised agenda of U.S. demands. This shift in the U.S. rationale made normalization even more

2
difficult, because Washington was now demanding not just an end to objectionable Cuban

behavior abroad but to the very character of the socialist state.

There were countervailing forces, however. As the Cuban economy integrated into

global markets and opened up to foreign direct investment, the potential economic benefit for the

U.S. business community came into clearer focus. By the late 1990s, a growing lobby of farm

interests, travel and entertainment companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers were working

for a relaxation of U.S. policy. In addition, the Cuban-American community was changing with

the regular flow of new immigrants whose reasons for departure were more economic than

political. That, plus the aging of the original exile generation, produced a more heterogenous

Cuban-American community with more heterodox politics.

Commerce Trumps Anti-Communism: The Eroding Power of the Cuba Lobby

The explanation for the persistence of the Cold War in the Caribbean lay in U.S.

domestic politics, in particular, the considerable political clout of the conservative Cuban-

American lobby. In the early 1970s, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Assistant Secretary

for Latin America William D. Rogers could contemplate normalizing relations with Cuba,

confident they would face no domestic opposition of any consequence except perhaps some

demonstrative acts by Cuban exile terrorists.3 No president since has enjoyed that luxury.

The political and financial power of conservative Cuban-Americans, organized most

effectively in the 1980s by Jorge Mas Canosa in the Cuban American National Foundation

(CANF), gave the community virtual veto power over U.S. policy. Wealthy, well-organized,

single-minded, and strategically concentrated in the key electoral states of Florida and New

Jersey, Cuban-Americans dominated the issue field. Foundation directors and their political

3
action committee, the Free Cuba PAC, contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to dozens of

sympathetic Congressional and presidential candidates in each election cycle--a total of several

million dollars since 1979.4 Any public official who even hinted at a policy of engagement with

Cuba came under attack. When Senator Lowell Weicker (R-Conn) traveled to Cuba in October

1980, met with Castro, and returned to advocate normalizing relations, CANF made an example

of him by working diligently, and successfully, to defeat him for reelection.5 Jorge Mas

Canosa's ready access to Congress and even to the White House was testimony to CANF's

success at positioning itself as the voice of Cuban-Americans.6

Although polls showed that a majority of the U.S. public in the 1980s and 1990s

continued to favor normalization of relations with Cuba, the issue was not highly salient.7 No

domestic group stood to reap any significant gain from a relaxation of relations with Cuba, at

least in the short term, so there was no countervailing constituency to the Cuba Lobby.

Successive presidents have followed the path of least political resistance by leaving the policy of

hostility in place.

The first crack in the Cuban-American right’s policy dominance was the embargo’s loss

of legitimacy after the Cold War. Without a national security rationale, the embargo looked less

and less justified. In light of Cuba’s economic hardship, it looked downright cruel. When it

included food and medicine, the embargo against Cuba constituted the most severe sanctions

Washington maintained against any country in the world, including countries with notably worse

human rights records (such as Indonesia and Afghanistan under the Taliban) and reputed terrorist

states (such as Iran and Iraq under Saddam Hussein). Every year since 1992, the United Nations

General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution calling on Washington to

end the embargo, in 2002 by the largest margin ever: 173-3 with four abstentions.

4
 The suffering endured by ordinary Cubans during this crisis prompted a significant

humanitarian response in the United States. A number of new and existing non-governmental

organizations (NGOs) launched relief projects, including Pastors for Peace (which refused on

principal to seek the required licenses from the U.S. Treasury Department), U.S.+Cuba Medical

Project, Madre, and Catholic Relief Services (CRS). From 1992 to 2001, the Treasury

Department granted licenses for $334 million in humanitarian medical assistance.8 Except for

CRS, these NGOs combined their direct aid campaigns with popular education projects aimed at

mobilizing public opinion against the embargo on humanitarian grounds. In Congress,

Democrats introduced legislation to exempt sales of food and medicine from the embargo,

arguing that U.S. policy aggravated the shortages in Cuba, especially of medicine.

Despite their undiminished hatred of Fidel Castro, Cuban-Americans were also moved by

the plight of their brethren, and responded by increasing the flow of in-kind assistance and cash

remittances. Cuban-Americans had been sending such aid ever since 1978, when family visits

were first authorized by the U.S. and Cuban governments. The growth of in-kind assistance was

slow during the 1980s, however, because the Cuban government sharply curtailed the number of

Cuban-American visitors after the 1980 Mariel boatlift crisis, and mail service was unreliable.

Getting cash to Cuba faced similar obstacles, and until 1993, it was illegal for Cubans to hold

U.S. currency, so dollars could only be used on the black market. Nevertheless, by 1990, rough

estimates of the cash remittances being sent to Cuba totaled about $150-200 million annually.9

Desperate to acquire hard currency, the government legalized the holding of dollars in 1993 so

that it could capture part of the remittances stream. By 1994, the estimated value of private cash

transfers to Cuba had risen to $500 million a year.10

5
 Conservatives in the Cuban-American community, led by CANF, initially opposed

sending remittances on the grounds that they helped Castro stabilize the economy and therefore

prolonged his rule. During the 1994 rafters crisis President Clinton bowed to CANF’s lobbying

by cutting off cash remittances and ending most charter flights, making family visits more

difficult. But such measures were not universally supported among Cuban-Americans, many of

whom were more immediately concerned with the well-being of their families than with

punishing Fidel Castro.11 Many in the community simply ignored the new rules. Bolstered by

improved mail and telephone service, the family ties between Cubans in the United States and

Cubans on the island had become too well established and too important to be so easily severed.

The prohibition on remittances had no noticeable effect on the availability of dollars in Cuba.

Cuban-Americans simply sent funds through third countries or carried them by hand, traveling

through Mexico, Jamaica, or the Bahamas.12 In 1998, after Pope John Paul II’s visit to Cuba,

Clinton lifted the restrictions on remittances, and by the end of the decade, they reached between

$800 million and a billion dollars annually.13

Divisions in the Cuban-American community over family contacts were the first

indication that the political power of the Cuban-American right was eroding. CANF’s

unrelenting opposition to family visits, as well as humanitarian assistance and remittances, even

in the face of Cuba’s economic crisis, now put it at odds with many of its own constituents. In

October 2000, a majority of Cuban-Americans favored a national dialogue between Cubans

abroad and Castro’s government over family issues, unrestricted travel to Cuba, and the sales of

medical supplies and food, numbers that had all increased since 1997.14 More and more exiles

no longer looked at the situation in Cuba in terms of confrontation, but in terms of reconciliation,

6
in the sense of looking for a common destiny, and not one in which there will be winners and

losers.

Cleavages within the community were sharp; older Cuban-Americans who left Cuba in

the 1960s and 1970s tended to take a much harder position than younger ones who left in the

1980s and 1990s or who were born in the United States. The later immigrants, from the boatlift

onwards, were primarily economic rather than political refugees. Unlike the exiles of the 1960s,

they did not harbor the same depth of ideological animosity toward the Cuba they left behind.

These later arrivals were overwhelmingly in favor of family travel and humanitarian trade,

whereas the older Cuban-Americans were opposed.15 “There's a split in the Cuban American

community... between those who still have relatives there and those who don't,” explained the

director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, Lisandro Perez.

“Most of the Cuban-American leadership are people who came here in the 1960s and 1970s.

They are not likely to have family in Cuba anymore. Among recent emigres, however, the

concern is to help their families.”16

These cleavages opened more political space in Miami for moderate Cuban-Americans.

The Committee for Cuban Democracy (CCD), led initially by Bay of Pigs veteran Alfredo

Duran, became a significant alternative voice in the late 1990s, as did Cambio Cubano, led by

former political prisoner Eloy Gutiérrez-Menoyo.17 The Pope’s visit and his call for Cuba “[to]

open itself to the world and...the world [to] open itself up to Cuba” gave further legitimacy to

Cuban-Americans who favored a U.S. policy of greater engagement.18

In November 1997, Jorge Mas Canosa died of cancer, depriving the Cuban-American

right of its most dynamic, charismatic, and politically astute leader. His dominance of Miami’s

political scene was so great that there were no obvious successors to fill his shoes. In Mas

7
Canosa’s shadow, other leaders did not flourish. His son, Jorge Mas Santos, took over as

CANF’s chairman, but his strengths were more as a businessman than a politician.19 Without

Mas Canosa’s hand at the helm, CANF seemed adrift, lacking a clear strategy. At the moment of

transition, it had to face its greatest challenge: the arrival of Elián González in late November

1999.

Rescued at sea floating in an inner tube after the boat carrying his mother and several

other would-be ‘refugees’ sank in the Florida Straits, six-year old Elián became an immediate

icon to the Cuban-American community--the miracle boy saved by divine intervention, the

symbol of Cuba’s youth, of Cuba’s future. To most members of the community, Elián’s future

belonged in the United States, as vindication of the choice they had made in leaving Cuba. That

this small boy should be returned to Castro, to the Cuba of socialism-or-death, was

unthinkable.20 A Miami Herald poll found that 91 pecent of Cuban-Americans in South Florida

believed Elián should stay in the United States.21

The dilemma for Cuban-American leaders, including CANF, was that most U.S. citizens

saw Elián’s case as a matter of parental rights rather than a symbolic confrontation with Cuban

communism. Support for sending the boy back to Cuba with his father grew from 56 percent in

January 2000 to 67 percent in April.22 Sixty percent supported the federal government’s decision

to forcibly seize Elián from the Miami relatives. Republicans were almost as likely as

Democrats to favor returning Elián to his father, a fact which no doubted muted Republican

criticism of the Justice Department’s decisions.23

For many Cuban-Americans, however, the forcible removal of Elián from his Miami

relatives and his return to Cuba produced a sense of betrayal unmatched since President John F.

Kennedy refused to use U.S. military forces to save the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

8
Demonstrators trampled the American flag and denounced their adopted homeland in front of the

television cameras. Cuban-American local officials implied they would not obey federal

authority or even control civil disorder. Anglo counter-demonstrators threw bananas at Miami’s

city hall to symbolize their anger at living in a ‘banana republic.’24

This paroxysm of rage proved disastrous for Cuban-American political influence beyond

Miami. At a moment when most U.S. citizens were paying attention to Cuba--moments that are

rare--Cuban-Americans appeared lawless, fanatical, and contemptuous of America.25 “The

picture that is being painted is an unstable Miami,” lamented Governor Jeb Bush, “a Miami that

cannot control itself.”26 Lawmakers who had been content to leave Cuba policy to the Cuban-

American community began to have second thoughts.

CANF in particular lost influence. Its inability to persuade the White House to keep

Elian in the U.S. represented the Foundation’s first major defeat after a string of victories

stretching from the establishment of Radio Martí to the 1996 passage of the Cuba Liberty and

Democratic Solidarity Act (Helms-Burton). In Miami, rivals on the right openly challenged the

efficacy of CANF’s Washington-focused strategy of lobbying the political establishment,

prompting CANF to announce a new program of direct aid to Cuban dissidents.27 In

Washington, not only was the wisdom of CANF’s hard line called into question, so was its

political muscle. Legislators who opposed CANF’s demands to keep Elián in the United States

suffered no negative political consequences, proving that the Foundation was not invincible after

all. Like the China lobby that held U.S.-China relations hostage for nearly a generation, CANF

proved to be a paper tiger.

In an effort to refurbish CANF’s image and influence, Jorge Mas Santos shifted toward

the political center. He supported holding the Latin Grammy awards in Miami, despite the

9
participation of Cuban artists. When Cuba sought to buy food and medicine from the United

States in the aftermath of Hurricane Michelle, CANF did not oppose the sales, nor did it oppose

former President Jimmy Carter’s trip to Cuba in 2002.28 When George Bush considered banning

remittances and direct flights to Cuba in 2003, CANF opposed the sanctions because of the

impact they would have on Cuban families--180 degree reversal of its position during the 1994

rafters crisis.29 So stark was CANF’s shift to the center that a recalcitrant minority of hardliners

on its board felt that Jorge Jr. had betrayed the legacy of his father, and they resigned in protest.30

The declining political power of the Cuban-American right coincided with the

mobilization, for the first time, of an organized constituency with an interest in improving

relations with Cuba--the business community. For years, business had been notoriously absent

from the debate over Cuba. Even after the end of the Cold War, when business played a key role

in pressing for normal trade relations with China and Vietnam, interest in Cuba was negligible.

Cuba’s potential market was much smaller than Vietnam’s, not to mention China’s, but the main

reason for the lack of corporate interest was Cuba’s uninviting business environment.

When Castro first opened the island to joint ventures in the 1980s, the laws governing

foreign investment were strict and inflexible, reflecting the government’s residual ideological

hostility. After the Soviet Union collapsed, however, Cuba began to actively court foreign

investment. In 1995, the investment law was amended to allow 100 percent foreign ownership

in certain industries, and bureaucratic reforms made Cuba more attractive. By 2001, there were

392 joint ventures with partners around the globe.31

As European trade and investment grew, U.S. corporations began to worry about losing a

potentially lucrative market to foreign competitors. “We're saying on behalf of the American

business community that it's time to look at this another way,” said Thomas J. Donohue,

10
president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce after a three-day visit to Cuba in 1999. “Who does

well there?... It's the Canadians, the Germans, the French, the Italians. All of our friends.... Ask

Bill Marriott or the guys at the Hilton, do they want to let everybody else in the world buy up

those beaches? We need a new approach.”32

Cuba also became a focal point for the business community’s discontent with

Washington’s use of unilateral economic sanctions in general. Ironically, the 1996 Helms-

Burton law crystallized this discontent because its extraterritorial pretensions threatened to

disrupt trade relations with Europe, Canada, and Latin America. Business associations were

drawn into lobbying on Cuba in 1996 to pressure the White House to waive implementation of

Title III of the law (which enables Cuban-Americans to sue foreign corporations in U.S. courts if

they ‘traffic’ in expropriated property).33 Shortly thereafter, the Chamber of Commerce, the

National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Trade Council (representing some 500

multinational corporations) began to develop a coordinated lobbying strategy against unilateral

sanctions.34

In early 1998, coinciding with the Pope’s trip to Cuba and his call for an end to the U.S.

embargo, Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba was inaugurated. Organized by the

Chamber of Commerce, this coalition was an unusual alliance of some 600 business

organizations and 140 religious and human rights groups dedicated to repealing the embargo on

food and medicine. The effort was endorsed by a pantheon of prominent former officials

including former Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul

Volcker, former World Bank president A.W. Clausen, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla

Hills, and former National Security Adviser and Secretary of Defense (in the Reagan

administration) Frank Carlucci.35 By focusing specifically on food and medicine, this coalition

11
was able to harness both the humanitarian impulses that arose in response to Cuba’s economic

hardship and the pecuniary interests of the business community--a combination that proved

surprisingly powerful.

The growing chorus of voices in favor of reexamining policy toward Cuba included some

prominent conservatives. In 1998, a constellation of Republican luminaries called upon

President Clinton to appoint a bipartisan national commission to reassess U.S. policy. The

initiative was endorsed by former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and

Lawrence Eagleburger, former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, former Secretaries of

Agriculture John Block and Clayton Yeutter, former Senate Majority Leader and White House

Chief of Staff Howard Baker, Jr., along with several dozen U.S. senators and congressmen.36

Although Clinton rejected the idea, prominent Republicans went on to create the Cuba Policy

Foundation, headed by Ambassador Sally Grooms Cowel, to lobby for a new policy. In 1999,

the surpremely establishmentarian Council on Foreign Relations launched a task force on U.S.-

Cuban relations that concluded with a call for new initiatives from Washington.37

At first, conservative Cuban-Americans and their allies on Capitol Hill were confident

that with the Congress under Republican control, they could turn back any legislative effort to

ease the embargo. “It's the same people, with the same proposals, with the same votes, and they

will lose graciously, as they always have,” said Senator Robert Torricelli.38 Rep. Ileana

Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla), one of the three Cuban-American members of Congress, reacted

contemptuously to the formation of Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba. “This is

really an unholy alliance between the usual suspects who are always anti-embargo, the church

groups and now, Wall Street,” she said. “The greedy businessmen, the Chamber of Commerce,

won't do away with the embargo.”39

12
 In August 1999, however, to the surprise of almost everyone, the Senate overwhelmingly

approved a proposal by conservative John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) to end all U.S. embargoes on food

and medicine, including the one against Cuba. Republican leaders in the House prevented the

proposal from being considered there, but it reappeared in 2000, sponsored by another farm state

Republican in a tight race for re-election, Rep. George Nethercutt (R-Wash). In the midst of the

election campaign, a moment when American politicians are notorious for avoiding controversy,

large majorities in both houses of the Republican-controlled Congress voted to lift the ban on

selling food and medicine to Cuba and the ban on travel. In the conference committee, however,

Republican Congressional leaders used their control of the rules to impose a compromise that

lifted the embargo on sales of food and medicine, but denied Cuba any U.S. government or

private sector financing to make purchases. This financial straightjacket meant that the practical

effect of lifting the food and medicine embargo was minimized, and the Cuban government

initially denounced the measure as a fraud.40 As part of the compromise, the travel ban was

retained as well. Nevertheless, the bipartisan support that the measure received in both the House

of Representatives and Senate demonstrated that the strength of the political forces defending the

status quo was on the wane.

Congress Gets Bush-Whacked

With Congressional momentum moving against the embargo, the election of George W.

Bush came in the nick of time for the hardliners on Cuba. Having gained the presidency by

virtue of a few hundred votes in Florida, Bush was especially attentive to the Cuban-American

constituency, 80 percent of which voted for him. Conservative Cuban-Americans, long a key

element of Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s coalition, had ready-made access to the Bush White

13
House. Bush appointed more Cuban-Americans to senior positions than any president before

him. Mel Martinez, a political ally of Jeb, was appointed secretary of housing and urban

development, becoming the first Cuban-American member of the cabinet. Otto Reich, Bush’s

choice to be Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, was notorious for

demonizing opponents when he ran Ronald Reagan’s public diplomacy operation--so notorious,

in fact, that he could not win Senate confirmation and took office through a recess appointment.

Reich’s deputy, Lino Gutierrez, was also a former Reagan official. Col. Emilio Gonzalez was

named to the National Security Council (NSC) staff as director for the Caribbean and Central

America, covering Cuba. Mauricio Tamargo, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s former chief of staff, was

named chairman of the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission (with jurisdiction over Cuban-

American claims against Cuba under Title III of Helms-Burton, and existing U.S. compensation

claims for property nationalized in the 1960s). Adolfo Franco, a Republican congressional

staffer, was named Latin America administrator for the U.S. Agency for International

Development. From the State Department to the NSC to USAID, conservative Cuban-

Americans were on the front lines of Bush’s foreign policy apparatus dealing with Latin

America. This president would be a bulwark against efforts to dilute the embargo. “We have an

insurance policy in George W. Bush,” said Cuban-American House member Lincoln Diaz-Balart

(R-Fla). “You’re not going to see George W. Bush betray the Cuban-American community.”41

Bush gave his first speech on Cuba in May 2001, celebrating the anniversary Cuba’s

independence from Spain. Declaring sanctions to be a “moral statement” as well as a policy

instrument, he promised to fight any effort to relax them “until this regime frees its political

prisoners, holds democratic, free elections, and allows for free speech.” Further, Bush promised

a more proactive approach. “The policy of our Government is not merely to isolate Castro but to

14
actively support those working to bring about democratic change in Cuba,” he said, including

providing them with material support.42 Two months later, Bush outlined a series of new

measures, including tougher enforcement of the travel ban (which tens of thousands of

Americans were ignoring), limits on remittances, and the new regulations governing

humanitarian assistance. He also reiterated his determination to actively support Cuban

opponents of the Castro government. “I will expand support for human rights activists, and the

democratic opposition,” he declared, “and we will provide additional funding for

non-governmental organizations to work on pro-democracy programs in Cuba.”43 He would not,

however, provoke a confrontation with European allies by allowing Cuban-Americans to sue

European firms for lost property under the Helms-Burton law. A few days after his tough public

speech, Bush quietly extended Clinton’s policy of waiving implementation of Title III.44

Increased travel to Cuba was not just a foreign policy problem for Bush; it was a

domestic problem as well. Besides depositing hard currency in Castro’s coffers, travelers

demystified Cuba and made it more difficult to maintain a demonized public image of Fidel

Castro. The travel section of every major newspaper ran stories about Cuba as an attractive

tourist destination, and every bookstore featured travel guides to Cuba from all the major

publishers. As more and more people went and recounted their experiences to family and

friends, Cuba seemed more and more like just another tropical island, albeit it a little threadbare,

not the arch-enemy of the Bush administration’s rhetoric. The Cubans themselves were well

aware of this dynamic and sought to encourage it by welcoming American tourists. “Each one

who comes, goes back to the United States and tells the truth about Cuba,“ said Foreign Minister

Felipe Pérez Roque. “They say they have been to hell, but hell is not as hot as it had been

depicted.”45

15
 By most estimates, the total number of Americans visiting Cuba annually was 150,000-

200,000, most of whom were Cuban-Americans visiting family. Some 30,000 others traveled

legally under approved licenses, and the rest (somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000) traveled

illegally.46 During the Clinton presidency, efforts by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets

Control (OFAC) to enforce the travel ban were not very intense. The number of enforcement

actions varied annually from a low of 46 to a high of 188 in 2000. In 2001, however, under the

new regimen of tougher travel rules, the Bush administration undertook 766 enforcement

actions.47 Additionally, the administration made the application process for new licenses more

complicated, slowed down the processing of applications, and turned down applications more

frequently. In early 2003, the administration adopted new regulations ending ‘people-to-people’

exchanges that were not part of regular academic programs of study, a category that included

most legal travelers who were not Cuban- Americans.48 The decision to tighten travel

restrictions was not a popular one. In 2001, a poll undertaken for the Cuba Policy Foundation

found that Americans favored unrestricted travel to Cuba by a wide margin, 67 percent to 24

percent. In early 2003, a poll of Cuban-Americans in south Florida found them evenly split on

the travel issue: 46 percent in favor of unrestricted travel, 47 percent against.49

For Cubans seeking to visit the United States, the process became even more onerous.

Some 18,000 visas were granted to Cuban visitors in 2001, only 7,000 in 2002.50 Cuban officials

seeking to meet with U.S. businessmen to buy food and medicine were denied visas, including

the head of Cuba’s food import enterprise. Visas for Cuban musicians were held up so long that

22 of them missed the 2002 Grammy Awards ceremony, which had been moved to Los Angeles

from Miami for fear of violence by anti-Castro extremists. Of the 106 Cuban scholars who

16
sought visas to participate in the 2003 Latin American Studies Association professional meeting,

only about half received them.51

The new Congress was undeterred by the new president’s hardline on Cuba, and picked

up where the old Congress had left off. In July, the House of Representatives voted 240-186 in

favor of an amendment to the Treasury appropriation offered by Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) to end the

travel ban, eight votes more than the same proposal had gotten in 2000. An amendment by

Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) to end the embargo entirely made a surprisingly strong showing, losing

201-227.52 In the Senate, Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) promised he would offer Flake’s amendment

when the Senate version of the bill came to the floor. He also planned to propose an amendment

to the Agricultural appropriation that would lift the ban on private financing of food and

medicine sales. His plans were derailed, however, by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on

New York and Washington, after which national unity was a high priority for Congress,

especially in the field of foreign policy. "The terrorist attacks and the change in climate at the

moment made it an inappropriate time to address this issue," said Dorgan, explaining why he

decided not to offer his amendments on either travel or food sales. In conference committee on

the Treasury bill, the House language lifting the travel ban was dropped, in part because the

Republican leaders in the House opposed it and in part because Bush threatened to veto it if the

language was retained.53

The View From Havana: Economics in Command

For Cuba, the end of the Cold War changed everything. The economic shock that

accompanied the collapse of Europe’s socialist bloc compelled Cuba to reintegrate its economy

with global markets. That, it turn, made rapprochement with the United States advantageous in a

17
way that it had not been in the 1970s and 1980s. Not only was the U.S. market a natural one for

Cuba, it was also the main point of origin of tourists bound for the Caribbean, and the main

source of direct foreign investment in the region.

Cuba’s economic restructuring in the 1990s also made the socialist state more vulnerable.

The contraction of the state sector of the economy, the proliferation of private entrepreneurs and

private markets, the de facto privatization of agriculture, the growing social inequalities based

on access to dollars--all these developments undermined the core values of Cuban socialism and

hence regime legitimacy. Ending the U.S. embargo was therefore important for economic

recovery, but also fraught with political risks: would the benefits of enhanced economic growth

outweigh the socially disruptive effects of marketization?

The loss of Soviet economic assistance, which totaled at least three billion dollars

annually, sent the Cuban economy into a tailspin that lasted until 1994. The gross domestic

product shrank by more than a third, imports fell by more than half, and unemployment swelled

as factories closed for lack of critical inputs. Cuba’s leaders were forced to implement a series of

economic reforms aimed at making Cuba competitive in the world market and at stimulating

domestic production through the introduction of market incentives. For the first time since the

early 1960s, U.S. economic sanctions became a significant obstacle to Cuban prosperity.54

Conservatives in the United States, hopeful that the collapse of the Cuban regime was

imminent, tried to accelerate the process by tightening the embargo in areas where it had become

lax. The 1992 Cuban Democracy Act (CDA) sponsored by Congressman Robert Torricelli (D-

NJ) reinstated the ban on trade with Cuba by the subsidiaries of U.S. corporations in third

countries (a measure lifted by Gerald Ford in 1975), thus halting some $768 million in annual

trade, 90 percent of which involved Cuban imports of food and medicine.55 In 1996, Senator

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Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Congressman Dan Burton (R-Ind) cosponsored the ‘Cuba Liberty and

Democratic Solidarity Act’ to deter foreign corporations from investing in Cuba by making them

subject to law suits in U.S. courts if they “trafficked” in property confiscated from U.S. citizens,

including naturalized Cuban-Americans. The Helms-Burton legislation also inscribed the

embargo into law, preventing the president from simply revoking the executive orders that

originally imposed it and normalizing relations.56

The U.S. embargo hampered Cuba’s economic recovery in a variety of ways. Because it

had to conduct most of its trade with Europe rather than the nearby United States, Cuba’s

shipping costs, especially for bulk commodities like exported sugar and imported grain, were far

higher.57 This expense was exacerbated by a provision of the embargo prohibiting ships that call

in Cuban ports from entering U.S. ports for six months. Goods produced under patent only by

U.S. corporations (including many pharmaceuticals) were unavailable to Cuba. The 1992 Cuban

Democracy Act purportedly legalized the sale of medical supplies, and the 2000 Agricultural

Appropriations Act did the same for food, but restrictions in the laws limited the practical

feasibility of such sales.58 A number of independent studies have documented the deleterious

impact of U.S. sanctions on the Cuban health care system.59

The embargo complicated Cuba’s effort to diversify away from sugar production and into

tourism. The United States is the country of origin for most of the Caribbean tourist trade, and

the main source of foreign direct investment in Latin America. Although Cuba enjoyed

considerable success in developing tourism, the future expansion of this sector was limited so

long as the United States prohibited tourist travel to the island. A U.S. government study

estimated that if sanctions were lifted, between 100,000 and 350,000 additional U.S. residents

19
would travel to Cuba annually (approximately doubling the current number), and these visitors

would provide Cuba with between $90 million and $350 million in revenue.60

Finally, Cuba’s isolation from international financial institutions meant that the impact of

adjusting to the shock of the Soviet collapse fell fully on the shoulders of Cuban consumers.

Neither the International Monetary Fund (IMF) nor the World Bank were available for

emergency infusions of cash and credit. Cuba withdrew from these institutions in the 1960s, and

has been prohibited from participating in the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) since its

membership in the Organization of American States was suspended. U.S. policy opposed

allowing Cuba back into any of these institutions. Although Fidel Castro had nothing but scorn

for the IMF, calling it a “sinister” tool of the United States that has perpetuated the subjugation

of the underdeveloped nations, he was less critical of the World Bank and IDB.61

For all these reasons, Cuba has had a compelling economic interest in normalizing its

commercials relations with the United States. With the embargo inscribed in law by Helms-

Burton, however, the only hope for loosening it lay in cultivating political constituencies in the

United States that could pressure Congress to rewrite the law. The Cubans have been solicitous

of three such constituencies: moderate Cuban-Americans, grassroots nongovernmental

organizations that have taken advantage of ‘people-to-people’ contacts, and the business

community.

As described earlier, demographic changes in the Cuban-American community have

made it less monolithic politically. The Cuban government tried to encourage and capitalize on

that change by differentiating its traditional enemies from the Cuban-American community at-

large. In the early years of the revolution, all those who went into exile were denounced as

‘gusanos’ (worms). In later years, as more and more emigrants left for economic reasons and

20
sent remittances to family back home, the gusanos became the ‘Cuban community abroad.’

Only the community’s unreconstructed hardliners were singled out for the government’s venom,

routinely referred to as the ‘Miami terrorist mafia.’62 Raúl Castro explained the distinction.

“The émigré community cannot be considered as a monolithic bloc of traitors of the nation,

supporters of the blockade and of the overthrow of the Revolution. Those who are part of the

exile mafia with extreme right-wing views and terrorist behavior...manipulate, to some extent,

the Cuban émigré community in [the United States]. Another minority is growing, brave émigrés

who defend Cuba. A large number simply want to have normal contact with their relatives and

live in peace with their country of origin.”63

In 1994, the Cuban government invited over 200 exiles to a ‘Nation and Migration’

conference in Havana to begin the process of ‘normalizing’ relations between the island and the

diaspora. It was the first significant meeting between the government and the exile community

since the 1978 ‘Dialogue’ at the height of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to improve U.S.-

Cuban relations. The agenda was dominated by issues of travel and family contacts. The island

government agreed to lift a number of restrictions on travel by exiles, and even offered to allow

them to invest in Cuba on the same terms as any foreign investor. The unspoken hope was that

easier travel would produce more travel and more external support for family members in Cuba.

Nor was the government unaware of the potential political impact in the United States. "If they

want to invest here, they now have a better understanding of the importance of lifting the

embargo," explained Cuban official spokesman Miguel Alfonso.64 Conference participants were

criticized vociferously by Miami conservatives, but as polls showed, most Cuban-Americans

agreed with the sentiments of Dr. Bernardo Benes, who led the 1978 dialogue. “Right now, Cuba

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is a house on fire and it's not the time to ask who is to blame. The priority is to put out the flames

and save the children inside the house."65

Several months later, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina met secretly in Spain

with the leaders of three moderate exile opposition groups, two of which maintained explicit ties

to dissidents on the island.66 A second ‘Nation and Migration’ conference was held the

following year, and unlike the first conference, invitations were not restricted to those who were

generally supportive of the Revolution. Over 350 participants came from 34 countries.67 A third

conference was scheduled for April 2003, with anticipated participation of over 1,000 people,

but was postponed until May 2004 amidst the furor caused by Cuba’s arrest of 75 dissidents, and

only 200 expatriates participated.68

Easing travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans was by no means risk free for the

government. The first time it threw open the doors to returning emigrants, in 1978, nearly

150,000 flooded the island in just over a year. Their obvious wealth compared to that of

ordinary Cubans exacerbated smoldering discontent due to an economic downturn Cuba

experienced in the late 1970s. The result was the Mariel boatlift crisis. But like so many of the

potentially destabilizing reforms Cuba had to make in the 1990s to survive the ‘Special Period,’

economic necessity trumped political sensitivity, and Cuba-American travel was allowed to

expand.

Faced with antagonism from official Washington, the Cuban government has long tried

to build bridges to sympathetic Americans in the hope that their influence might mitigate U.S.

hostility. This strategy was largely ineffective when travel to Cuba was illegal for everyone in

the United States except journalists, academics, and Cuban-Americans. But when President

Clinton allowed travel for religious, humanitarian, and ‘people-to-people’ cultural exchanges,

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almost two hundred nongovernmental organizations launched programs in Cuba, sending some

30,000 people annually.69 The humanitarian efforts, especially by churches, to aid Cuba in the

depth of its economic crisis created permanent linkages, in much the same way that Cuban-

Americans were forging (or reforging) family connections. A Sister Cities movement arose, for

example, linking 17 Cuban cities with U.S. cities. Robert Torricelli and Bill Clinton embraced

people-to-people contacts between the United States and Cuba anticipating that such exchanges

would help create in Cuba a constituency for changing the Cuban regime. An unanticipated

result was that such contacts created a constituency in the United States for changing U.S.

policy.

An even more important one was developing within the farming and business sectors. At

first, the Cubans reacted badly to the limitations on financing that Republican congressional

leaders imposed on the sale of food and medicine in 2000. The conditions were “humiliating”

said Vice-President Carlos Lage, and until they were changed, Cuba would not buy “a single

grain of rice or a single aspirin.”70 The Cubans seemed to think that if there were no sales, the

business lobby would return to Congress and force it to remove the onerous financing

conditions. The actual effect of the Cuban boycott was just the opposite. After several years of

tough congressional battles, the business community had nothing to show for it. They had won

the right to sell food and medicine to Cuba, but the Cubans weren’t buying. Some business

lobbyists began to wonder if trying to do business with Cuba was more trouble than it was

worth.71

In November 2001, Cuba was hit by Hurricane Michelle, a Category Four storm, the

worst in half a century. Although there were few fatalities, Michelle caused an estimated $1.8

billion in damage, destroying large portions of the sugar, citrus, banana, and tobacco crops.72

23
The United States offered emergency disaster relief, but Cuba took the opportunity to ask instead

to purchase food and medicine on a ‘one time’ basis to replenish depleted stocks.73 The

hurricane gave the Cubans an opportunity to step down from their intransigent position on sales

without losing face. A few months later, the Cubans announced they would continue purchasing

food under the terms of existing U.S. law.74

In the last few weeks of 2001, Cuba bought $35 million worth of food from U.S. firms,

and another $165 million in 2002.75 “American business has been reintroduced to Cuba,” said

John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. “We’re back, and this

is irreversible.”76 The Cubans were careful to spread their contracts around for maximum

political effect, even when it was not the most economical approach. Like savvy U.S. defense

contractors, they made sure that as many congressional districts as possible had some stake in

the sales. By late 2002, businesses in 27 states had contracts with Cuba. “At the end of the day,

it’s all about politics,” explained a Cuban official.77

The resumption of trade with Cuba, the first trade of any significance with U.S. firms

since 1962, re-energized the business community’s interest.78 State and local officials from

around the United States began traveling to Havana to seek out opportunities for their

constituents, and almost all of them were received by Castro personally. U.S. diplomat Vicki

Huddleston dubbed the performance Castro’s “charm offensive.”79 Governor George Ryan of

Illinois went to Cuba twice; Governor John Hoeven of North Dakota went and returned with $2

million in sales contracts; and Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota went with a retinue

businessmen for a four-day food and agribusiness trade show. Even local officials from Tampa

and the Florida Keys made the journey.80

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 These trips infuriated the Bush administration. It refused to grant a license to a Farm

Foundation delegation that included several top agribusiness executives and two former

secretaries of agriculture (both Democrats). But when elected officials made the trip, there was

not much the administration could do to stop them.81 It may have been no coincidence that

when, in November 2002, the State Department expelled four Cuban diplomats as punishment

for the Ana Belen Montes espionage case, one of the diplomats expelled from his post at the

Cuban Interests Section in Washington was the liaison to the U.S. business community.82

Moreover, on the eve of the September 2002, Food and Agriculture Exhibition, Otto

Reich publicly excoriated U.S. businesses for rushing to Cuba for contracts. Comparing Castro

to Adolf Hitler, he called participants in the trade show Castro’s “props,” and accused them of

acting against the national interest, especially in light of Cuba’s alleged bio-weapons program.

“It would be one of the greatest ironies in history if the wealth of the American private sector is

what keeps that failed government from finally collapsing," Reich said. Then--to add insult to

injury--he urged Governor Ventura and his delegation to “refrain from sexual tourism” during

their trip.83

When the trade show opened, with 288 exhibitors from 33 states, the newly appointed

head of the U.S. Interests Section, James Cason, made a point of attending to warn participants

that Cuba was an “international deadbeat,” already behind in debt payments to various European

governments and firms. Cuba had a “Jurassic Park economy,” Cason quipped, and would not be

a sound business partner.84 Despite Cason’s warnings, exhibitors signed $66 million in new

contracts with Cuban trade representatives.85

Both the Bush administration and the Cuban government foresaw that the growing trade

in food and medicine could have deleterious political implications for the rest of the embargo.

25
Food and medicine were the proverbial crack in the dam wall. As Cuban Foreign Minister

Felipe Pérez Roque put it, food sales were "an example of what the future could hold" for

relations between the two countries.86 Otto Reich’s spin was different, but the point was the

same: "What we believe [Castro] wants to do here is to entice the U.S. agricultural

community...with cash purchases so that we open up markets and have, quote, normal trade

relationships.”87

After 9/11: The ‘War on Terror’ and Cuba Policy

During his first few months in office, George W. Bush pledged that Latin America would

be the focus of his foreign policy, and his close relationship with Mexican President Vicente Fox

seemed a bellwether. The September 11 attacks upended that agenda. All other issues took

second place to the war on terrorism, centered on the Muslim world. Latin America was

peripheral to this conflict, and slid from the top of the White House agenda to the bottom.

Relations with key Latin allies like Mexico and Chile blew hot and cold depending upon their

willingness to back Washington’s ‘antiterrorism’ efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.88

With the attention of U.S. senior policymakers focused in the Eastern Hemisphere rather

than the Western, mid-level officials sought to cultivate attention for their favorite policy

initiatives by recasting them as ancillary to the war on terrorism. Thus, the war in Colombia,

which before September 11 had been justified as a war on drug trafficking, was quickly reframed

as a war on terrorism, with the guerrilla movements and paramilitaries both added to the State

Department’s list of terrorist organizations. Congressional restrictions that prevented U.S.

military aid from being used to fight the guerrillas were lifted and aid to the Colombian military

increased.89

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 Hardliners in the Cuban-American community and the Bush Administration seized on the

terrorism issue as rationale for a more confrontational policy toward Cuba, and to fend off

growing Congressional pressures to relax the embargo. On September 20, 2001, speaking before

Congress, Bush had drawn the line starkly: “Either you are with us or you are with the

terrorists," he declared. "From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support

terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."90 Cuba, the hardliners

pointed out, had been on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of international terrorism

since the list’s inception in 1982, and it maintained friendly relations with other states on the list,

including Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq.91 The signs for Cuba were ominous.

Cuba’s security concerns vis-a-vis the United States have always had two dimensions:

fear that the United States might seek to redeem its defeat at the Bay of Pigs by launching a

direct invasion, and fear that the United States would exploit internal discontent to subvert the

socialist state. The end of the Cold War did not mean a reduction of Cuba security worries. If

anything, it meant just the opposite. Although in the waning years of the Cold War, the Soviet

military commitment to Cuba had been largely abandoned and economic aid had dwindled, the

Cubans still depended on the Soviets for all their military equipment and most of their trade.92

Not only did the disappearance of the Soviet Union leave the Cubans alone to face the harsh

discipline of the international market, it also left them alone to face the unrivaled military power

of the United States.

As the Cuban economy spiraled downward, the armed forces were not spared the budget

axe. From 1989 to 1999, the size of the regular armed forces fell by 80 percent, from 297,000

troops to just 50,000. Expenditures fell 64 percent (in constant dollars) from $1.73 billion to

$630 million, down from 2.9 percent of GNP to just 1.9 percent (ranking Cuba 87th of 167

27
countries, right below Laos and Fiji).93 The severe shortage of petroleum Cuba experienced in

the mid-1990s meant that the armed forces rarely trained, and 75 percent of its heavy equipment

was moth-balled. Required to produce all of its own food and much of its budget, the military

shifted its activities from war readiness to business.94 The Special Period transformed the Cuban

armed forces, the U.S. Defense Department reported, “from one of the most active militaries in

the Third World into a stay-at-home force that has minimal conventional fighting ability.”95

Gone were the halcyon days when the Cubans defeated the South Africans in Angola and the

Somalis in the Ogaden desert.

With no Soviet patron and a decrepit military of its own, Cuba had no chance whatsoever

of deterring or fending off a military attack by the United States. The best it could do was seek

sanctuary in the bulwarks that small powers have longed used to shield themselves from great

power pretensionsB international law and the good offices of the international community.

Never more than a slender reed, these safeguards looked especially precarious when George W.

Bush declared the new doctrine of unilateral preventive war and invaded Iraq, despite majority

opposition on the United Nations Security Council.

On September 11, 2001, Cuba was one of the first countries to express condolences to the

United States and offer help.96 As commercial flights were grounded and airports closed all

across the United States, Cuba offered its airports to any U.S. flight that needed a place to land.

The tone of the Cuban response shifted from sympathy to concern after Bush’s September 20

speech to the Congress. While reiterating Cuba’s opposition to terrorism in principle and its

determination to prevent any terrorist attack against the United States being launched from Cuba,

Castro also began to speak out vigorously against a unilateral U.S. military response. On

September 22, 2001, Castro called terrorism “dangerous and ethically indefensible,” and

28
described the September 11 attacks as “a huge injustice and a great crime...atrocious and

insane.” Nevertheless, he argued, the attacks should not be used as an excuse to “recklessly start

a war.” Bush’s speech to Congress, he warned, signaled a U.S. strategy to act “under the

exclusive rule of force, irrespective of any international laws or institutions.” The United Nations

was being “simply ignored [and] would fail to have any authority or prerogative whatsoever,” if

the United States could go to war whenever and against whomever it pleased. Cuba, he was

clearly worried, could end up a target of such unilateralism, although he thought “it will not be

easy to fabricate pretexts to do it.”97

Over the next year, Cuba’s strategy would be to do everything possible to demonstrate its

opposition to international terrorism and its willingness to cooperate to eradicate it, while at the

same time arguing strenuously that the United States did not have the right to wage war

unilaterally. Cuba signed all 12 international protocols against terrorism, and did not

object—even offering to cooperate with the provision of some services--when the United States

decided to use Guantanamo Naval base as a detention center for Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners.

Cuba proposed three draft agreements to the United States on cooperation against terrorism, drug

trafficking, and people smuggling, issues on which the two countries had mutual interests.

Washington did not respond.98

Against this background, Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Otto Reich

launched a review of policy toward Cuba with the aim of seeking new ways to promote a “rapid

and peaceful transition to democracy.” Foremost among them was to increase support for

opposition elements on the island.99 But the outcome of the policy reviewed seemed more

rhetorical than substantive. When Bush’s ‘New Initiative for Cuba’ was announced in May

2002, it sounded a lot like the old initiative from May 2001: hold firm against efforts to relax the

29
embargo, strengthen TV and Radio Martí, intensify enforcement of the restrictions on travel, and

increase support for Castro’s opponents. The rhetoric ratched up considerably, however. To a

Cuban-American audience in Miami, Bush described Castro as “a brutal dictator who cares

everything for his own power and nada for the Cuban people... [who] clings to a bankrupt

ideology that has brought Cuba's workers and farmers and families nothing-nothing-but isolation

and misery. Any Cuban who dissented could only expect “jail, torture, and exile.” Bush

promised to veto any effort to relax the embargo, because trade with Cuba would do nothing

more than “line the pockets of Fidel Castro and his cronies.”100

Castro responded in kind, referring specifically to the Miami speech as “arrogance,

demagogy and lies,” and charging Bush with having promised the Cuban-American right before

the election that he would destroy the Cuban Revolution. “These [plans] did not exclude

assassinating me.” Since September 11, Bush had resorted to “the rule of Nazi concepts and

methods” in his dealings with the rest of the world, Castro charged, and his intimate relationship

with Cuban-American terrorists in Miami “completely undermines his moral authority and

disqualifies him as a world leader to fight against terrorism.”101

Despite the escalating war of words between Washington and Havana, the September 11

attacks made the Cuban threat look puny by comparison. Critics argued that if Washington was

to rally a broad international coalition for the fight against terrorism, it could not afford to risk its

own credibility by continuing to brand Cuba a terrorist state for political reasons.102 Richard

Nuccio, who had been Clinton’s Special Adviser on Cuban Affairs, had tried in vain to get Cuba

dropped from the terrorist list when he was in government, because there was no evidence that

the Cubans were engaged in or supporting acts of international terrorism any longer. No one in

the intelligence community disputed the facts, according to Nuccio, but no one in the Clinton

30
White House was willing to weather the political firestorm sure to be unleashed if Cuba was

dropped from the list.103

When the State Department’s new list was released in May 2002, Cuba was still on it.

The rationale was that Cuba had vacillated over the war on terrorism, because Castro had

denounced U.S. military action in Afghanistan as excessive. The report also repeated prior

charges that Cuba harbored fugitives from U.S. justice, Basque terrorists from the ETA, and

Colombian guerrillas.104 Critics noted that the Basques were in exile in Cuba at the request of

the Spanish government, the Colombian guerrillas were there because Cuba was serving as a

neutral site for ongoing peace negotiations between the guerrillas and the Colombian

government, and the U.S. fugitives were there because the United States and Cuba did not have a

functioning extradition agreement.105 Moreover, there was no evidence in the report that Cuba

had actually done anything to provide “support for acts of international terrorism”--the statutory

criterion for membership on the terrorist list.106

But the deficiencies of evidence in the State Department report on global terrorism were

dwarfed by the furor that erupted when John R. Bolton, Under Secretary for Arms Control and

International Security, accused Cuba of developing biological weapons. In a May 2002 speech to

the conservative Heritage Foundation, entitled, ‘Beyond the Axis of Evil,’ Bolton elevated rogue

states Libya, Syria, and Cuba to evil’s second tier because of their efforts to acquire weapons of

mass destruction. “The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive

biological warfare research and development effort,” Bolton said. “Cuba has provided dual-use

biotechnology to other rogue states.”107

U.S. concerns about Cuba’s biotechnology industry dated to the early 1990s. The

advanced technology Cuba acquired to produce commercial pharmaceuticals had the potential

31
for dual use; like similar technologies in a host of other countries, it was equally capable of

producing biological weapons.108 The charge that Cuba actually was producing such weapons

gained currency in Miami in the late 1990s, when defector Alvaro Prendez claimed that Cuba

had Soviet medium range missiles armed with biological warheads aimed at south Florida. The

State Department spokesman dismissed the charges, saying, “The U.S. government follows the

matter of weapons of mass destruction very closely, and we can assure you that we know of no

reason to be alarmed.”109

The issue was revived in 1998, when Ken Alibek, former deputy director of the Soviet

Union’s biological weapons program, described how circumstantial evidence had convinced his

boss, Yuri Kalinin, that Cuban biotechnology was being used for weapons development.110 Once

again, the State Department issued a denial, saying, “We have no evidence that Cuba is

stockpiling or has mass-produced any BW [biological warfare] agents.” On background, U.S.

officials were even more definitive: “None of what we know adds up to Cuba having offensive

biological warfare capabilities. We get lots of reports from defectors and others, but when we go

to check them out it's always second and third hand, and the stuff doesn't check out.”111 In 1998,

a Defense Department report to Congress entitled, ‘The Cuban Threat to U.S. National Security,’

reiterated concerns about the potential for biological weapons development provided by Cuba’s

biotechnology industry, but did not claim that any weapons program was underway.112

Bolton’s speech, by contrast, seemed to announce that U.S. fears had been realized, that

the Cubans had launched a weapons program. But senior officials began backing away from the

claim almost immediately. The day after Bolton’s speech, Secretary of Defense Donald H.

Rumsfeld dodged the issue by claiming, “I haven’t seen the intelligence.” A few days later,

Secretary of State Colin Powell, commented, “As Under Secretary Bolton said recently, we do

32
believe that Cuba has a biological offensive research capability. We didn't say that it actually

had such weapons, but it has the capacity and the capability to conduct such research.”113 That

was not quite what Bolton said. He did not say the Cubans had the “capability” to do biological

weapons research, something that had been known for years. He said they had a “research and

development effort” underway.114

To confuse matters even more, it turned out that Bolton was repeating language that Carl

Ford, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, had used in Congressional

testimony in March. However, Ford’s two sentences on Cuba were buried in a longer report on

the global threat from weapons of mass destruction and so they went largely unnoticed.115 Ford

subsequently testified, under oath, that the language about Cuba had been cleared by the

intelligence community and reflected its collective judgment, one unchanged since a 1999

National Intelligence Estimate on the matter. But he hastened to draw a distinction between

Cuba’s limited developmental offensive biological warfare research and development effort and

a weapons development program. “We’ve never tried to suggest that we have the evidence, the

smoking gun, to prove proof positive that they had a program. A program suggests to us

something far more substantial than what we see in the evidence. But we feel very confident

about saying that they’re working, working on an effort that would give them a BW, a limited

BW offensive capability.... An effort in our minds is the research and development necessary to

create BW weapons in the laboratory.… Clearly we’re suggesting that Cuba is working on

biological weapons.”116

That seemed unequivocal, but Ford’s account began to waver as he was questioned by

the senators. What started out sounding like a research ‘effort’ to develop weapons began to

dissolve back into a mere capability. “Cuba has in our judgment the trained personnel, medical

33
and scientific, the knowledge as supported by their research into various diseases, both human

and animal. They have the research facilities, including biocontainment facilities. They have

everything you need to build an offensive biological weapon. They don’t need anything else.

The difference between that and a program is an arbitrary intelligence community judgment, that

to have a program, you need to be able to have a factory that tests the weapon, that puts the

weapon in a bomb or a shell and/or does research and development on that sort of weapons

program, and has a unit within the military specifically designated for a weapons capability....

We don’t see that in Cuba.”117

What evidence the government had remained classified, but Ford admitted that it had not

come from anyone actually working on biological weapons in Cuba, even though a number of

scientists had defected, including José de la Fuente, former Director of Research and

Development at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Cuba’s main biomedical

research institute. De la Fuente denied that he had seen or heard any evidence of Cuban

biological warfare research before leaving Cuba in 1999. “All our information is indirect,” Ford

acknowledged.118 Congressman Tim Roemer (D-Ind), a member of the House Intelligence

Committee, said flatly that Bolton’s charges were false.119

Whatever the truth of Cuba’s alleged bio-weapons ‘effort,’ it was hard not to think that

the Bolton speech was intentionally timed to make a big media splash just before former

President Jimmy Carter’s trip to Cuba. Bolton, a conservative political appointee, had chosen a

major public forum to announce three potential additions to the ‘axis of evil,’ though in the

Cuban case, the intelligence assessment had not changed in three years, despite Bolton’s

insinuation to the contrary. Just a few months before, at a United Nations conference in Geneva,

34
Bolton had accused five countries of secretly developing biological weapons, and Cuba was not

among them.120

The impending Carter trip was embarrassing to President Bush, who had been promising

a tougher policy on Cuba, and he tried to dissuade Carter from going. The trip was sure to give

renewed impetus to Congressional efforts to relax the embargo, which Carter opposed.

Reinforcing the perception that politics lay behind the timing of the Bolton bombshell, it turned

out that Assistant Secretary Reich--whose reputation for partisan manipulation of policy issues

during the Reagan years was well earned--had been pressing the intelligence community to allow

public dissemination of the bioweapons assessment.121

Carter was convinced the timing of the Bolton speech was designed to distract attention

from his trip and diffuse its policy impact. While in Cuba, he responded by pointing out that in

the intelligence briefings he received before departing for Havana, no one mentioned biological

weapons development. “There were absolutely no such allegations made or questions raised,”

Carter said. “I asked them myself on more than one occasion if there was any evidence that

Cuba has been involved in sharing any information with any country on earth that could be used

for terrorist purposes. And the answer from our experts on intelligence was no.”122

Fidel Castro denounced Bolton’s claim in no uncertain terms, as a “diabolical

fabrication” and an “infamous slander” designed to prevent Congress from easing the embargo.

“In our country... no one has ever thought of producing such weapons,” Castro insisted, and he

offered any international agency the right to inspect Cuba biotechnology facilities.123

Sure enough, when Congress again took up proposals to lift the travel ban and the

restrictions on food sales, opponents relied on the biological weapons charge as the centerpiece

of their strategy to block the proposals. In July, Congressman Flake again offered his

35
amendment prohibiting enforcement of the travel ban to the Treasury appropriation in the House.

Unlike prior years, however, conservative Republicans mounted a vigorous opposition because

the same language had already been inserted into the Senate bill, making it harder to strip out in

the conference committee as the leadership had done two years in a row. The leadership

structured the floor debate to Flake’s disadvantage, forcing members to vote first on an

amendment by Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter J. Goss (R-Fla). The Goss amendment

made lifting the travel ban contingent on a presidential certification that Cuba was not aiding

terrorists, developing biological weapons, or providing bioweapons technology to others.

The essential hollowness of the administration’s bioweapons argument was underscored

by its ineffectiveness as a legislative device. Goss, as chairman of the intelligence committee,

was well-versed in the evidence, yet even he did not repeat Bolton’s claims. Nor would he go so

far as to argue that Cuba was a state sponsor of international terrorism. “Whether it is a terrorist

sponsor today remains a difficult, open question,” he acknowledged, “and one which of our

executive agencies are working on.”124 The House rejected the Goss amendment handily,

182-247, and went on to pass the Flake amendment 262-167, even in the face of a presidential

threat to veto the bill. In all, 73 Republicans deserted Bush and their House leadership to

support Flake. The House then quickly passed amendments to lift the financial limit on

remittances to Cuba and to allow private financing of agricultural sales. Only Rangel’s perennial

bid to lift the embargo completely was beaten back, 204-226.125

“Those votes reflected a nation that’s got a different attitude on the subject than it had

three, four, five years ago,” observed Dick Armey (R-Tex), Republican Majority Leader.126

Armey himself was a good example of how attitudes were changing. Upon announcing his

decision to retire, Armey admitted that his support for continuing the embargo against Cuba had

36
been based on party and personal loyalty. "What you see in the House of Representatives and

what you see by way of individual votes--my own is an example--is loyalties to your friends," he

said. The embargo, he predicted, would be lucky to survive another year.127

Survive it did, however, once again by virtue of a legislative sleight of hand of the

Republican congressional leadership. In the Senate, where Dorgan was expected to successfully

amend the Agriculture appropriation to lift the ban on private financing for farm sales to Cuba,

the leadership avoided the vote by simply preventing the bill from ever coming to the floor.

They did the same with the Treasury bill. Both bills were among the eleven that had to be

combined into an omnibus appropriation, but in the process of crafting the omnibus, all the

provisions on Cuba were dropped because President Bush threatened to veto the entire bill and

bring the government to a halt rather than relax sanctions against Cuba.128 “People are wrong to

underestimate what it means to have President Bush on our side,” said Diaz-Balart (R-Fla), one

of the most stalwart anti-Castro legislators.129

Castro complained bitterly when Cuba was listed as a state sponsor of terrorism in 2002

and accused of bioweapons research. He pointed out that 3,478 Cubans had died in terrorist

attacks launched from the United States, many with U.S. government complicity, and a number

of those responsible still resided openly in Miami.130

‘Going Backward’: New Provocations and New Anxieties

For Cuba, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was even more disconcerting than the war against the

Taliban. At least in Afghanistan, the Taliban had, in fact, been sheltering and supporting Al

Qaeda. But there was no verifiable link between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks,

and the claims that Iraq weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed an imminent threat to its

37
neighbors were, at the very least, debatable. More importantly, the U.N. inspection regime was

addressing the issue of Iraqi WMD when the United States simply swept it aside and went to

war. What was to stop Washington from declaring Cuba’s notional bioweapons program an

imminent threat at least as serious as Saddam Hussein’s elusive WMD? Washington had already

declared Cuba a terrorist state, and Bush had promised that any state supporting terrorism would

be regarded as ‘hostile regime.’ He avowed the right of the United States to take ‘preemptive

action’ against its enemies, and Bolton, in his speech claiming that Cuba was developing

biological weapons, warned that countries developing WMD “can expect to become our

targets.”131

While these developments suggested the Bush administration might be trying to create an

excuse to attack Cuba directly, Castro was equally concerned with the threat to internal security.

In 1992, the CDA added a new dimension to U.S. policy to complement the three decades-old

economic sanctions regime. The idea of promoting ‘people-to-people’ contacts, which President

Bill Clinton embraced, sought to foster the development of Cuban civil society. This new facet

of U.S. policy was dubbed ‘Track II’ (Track I being the economic sanctions). ‘People-to-people’

contacts, through academic and cultural exchanges, and improved air and telecommunications

links, served a clear humanitarian purpose by easing the lives of ordinary citizens on both sides

of the Florida Straits. But Track II had a double edge. From the outset, Washington conceived

of these contacts as a way to subvert the Cuban government. That was how the policy was

promoted when first introduced by Congressman Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), author of CDA.

Drawn from the experience of Eastern Europe, Track II was founded on the assumption that

people-to-people contacts would promote the diffusion of ideas, strengthen independent non-

governmental organizations, and thereby erode the political control mechanisms of the

38
authoritarian state. The Eastern European Communist regimes "ultimately fell from the power

of ideas," Torricelli argued.132 By analogy, Castro would, too.

The Clinton administration was enamored of this approach, largely because the

President’s Special Adviser on Cuban Affairs, Richard Nuccio, authored the original Track II

provisions of the CDA when he worked for Torricelli. As described by Undersecretary Secretary

of State Peter Tarnoff, Track II aimed to “empower those living under [the regime’s] yoke to be

able to continue their struggle for democratic reform and human rights.... These actions are

intended to give hope to legitimate opponents of the regime to allow them to sustain the risks

and pressures of maintaining their struggle for democracy.”133 Under the rubric of Track II, the

Clinton administration improved telephone links with the island, allowed Cuban-Americans to

send remittances to their relatives, allowed U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to

provide humanitarian aid to NGOs in Cuba, and loosened travel restrictions for professional,

religious, and humanitarian purposes.134

In addition to allowing the expansion of academic and cultural contacts, Torricelli’s 1992

law also authorized Washington to take a more direct role, providing funding for “the support of

individuals and organizations to promote nonviolent democratic change in Cuba.”135 President

Clinton announced the first grant under this title of the law in October 1995, providing funding

to Freedom House to disseminate information in Cuba and to aid former prisoners.136 “We

believe that reaching out today will nurture and strengthen the fledgling civil society that will be

the backbone of tomorrow's democratic Cuba,” explained Clinton. “We will continue to help

Cuba's democratic opposition and the churches, human rights organizations, and others seeking

to exercise the political and economic rights that should belong to all Cubans.”137 The 1996

Helms-Burton law expanded the ‘democracy-building’ mandate of this overtly political program,

39
authorizing assistance to democratic and human rights groups in Cuba, and humanitarian aid for

former political prisoners and their families.138

George W. Bush’s pledge to increase U.S. support for opposition elements on the island

was immediately manifested through increased funding for ‘democracy programs’ aimed at

Cuba and a more aggressive posture by the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. During the Clinton

administration, U.S. AID spent about $10 million on the Cuba program. Bush raised the annual

budget from $3.5 million in FY2000 to $5.0 million in FY2001 and $7.0 million in FY2004.

The money was distributed to U.S. NGOs to finance programs designed to support Cuban human

rights activists, independent journalists, independent trade unionists, former political prisoners,

and nongovernmental organizations. At least until 2003, there was a prohibition on delivering

any of the funds in cash to Cuban clients, both because of concerns about accounting standards

and because of the risk entailed for recipients due to Cuba’s stringent laws prohibiting such

funding. Consequently, the support provided tended to be mostly in the form of material goods

(computers, cameras, etc.) and published materials critical of the Cuban government. However,

some participating U.S. organizations also delivered privately-raised cash to Cuban clients along

with the goods paid for by U.S. AID. An evaluation of the project conducted in 2001 noted that

it was very difficult to deliver much actual material assistance to clients in Cuba because of

Cuban government controls.139

It did not escape Fidel Castro’s notice that Washington envisioned Track II as an

instrument of subversion. “It seeks to destroy us from within,” he declared in July 1995, ”...to

infiltrate us, weaken us, to create all types of counterrevolutionary organizations, and to

destabilize the country.... These people want to exert influence through broad exchanges with

diverse sectors they consider vulnerable.”140 Predictably, the Cuban government reacted harshly

40
to Washington’s attempts to foster internal dissension, treating all dissidents as if they were

foreign agents and looking with suspicion at all Cuban contacts with foreigners.

In early 1996, after the passage of Helms-Burton, Raúl Castro denounced Cuban

intellectuals for having developed dangerously close ties with U.S. groups and foundations.

Cuba’s economic crisis had created “feelings of depression and political confusion,” he

acknowledged. The party needed to wage a “battle of ideas” to explain these events, lest people

lose faith in socialist values and be seduced by capitalist consumerism. “We must convince the

people, or the enemy will do it.” He went on to describe Track II efforts to create an

independent civil society as an attempt at “internal subversion.... The enemy does not conceal its

intention to use some of the so-called nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) established in

Cuba in recent times, as a Trojan horse to foment division and subversion here.” As an object,

negative lesson, Raúl singled out the Central Committee’s own research centers, especially the

Center for the Study of the Americas (CEA), which had fallen prey to U.S. efforts at “internal

subversion.”141

Shortly thereafter, the Cuban National Assembly adopted the Law for the Reaffirmation

of Cuban Dignity and Sovereignty as a response to the passage of Helms-Burton. The Cuban law

criminalized “any form of cooperation, whether direct or indirect, with the application of the

Helms-Burton Act,” including providing to the U.S. government information relevant to the law,

receiving resources from the U.S. government to promote the law, spreading information

provided by the U.S. government promoting the law, or cooperating with the mass media to

promote it. In short it criminalized a wide swath of common dissident activity, especially if it

was supported by the United States.142

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 In January 1999, President Clinton announced a series of measures ostensibly aimed at

easing relations with Cuba somewhat. At the time, Clinton was under pressure to appoint a

bipartisan commission to review bilateral relations which, with an eye on the Cuban-American

vote, he was loath to do on the eve of Al Gore’s 2000 election campaign. Although he rejected

the idea of a commission, Clinton loosened restrictions on religious, humanitarian and

professional travel, expanded direct air flights to Cuba from cities other than Miami, and offered

to restore direct mail service. But he added two additional measures that made the Cuban

government apoplectic: he allowed anyone in the United States to send remittances to anyone in

Cuba, whereas previously remittances had been restricted to family members. That meant

individuals or foundations in the United States could send money directly to Cuban dissidents.

And Clinton promised to allow sales of agricultural inputs to independent farmers “for the

purpose of promoting economic activity that is independent of the Cuban Government.”143

“What the hell is this?” stormed National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcón. “Now,

in order to intensify their war against Cuba in the political and ideological areas, in the field of

subversion...they have come across the idea of using other American institutions not only the

government.... Foundations, non-governmental organizations, whatever, can finance people who

are not their relatives.” Such a regulation could only have “a clearly subversive,

counterrevolutionary, interventionist purpose,” he argued. “Every American buy a Cuban!” He

didn’t think much better of the farm provisions.144

The Cubans struck back with new legislation, the Law for the Protection of Cuban

National Independence and the Economy (Law No. 88), making it illegal to disseminate

subversive material from the United States, collaborate with foreign mass media for subversive

purposes, hinder international economic relations, or receive material resources from the U.S.

42
government.145 That effectively meant that any Cuban involved with U.S. AID’s democracy

promotion program was breaking the law.

The need for unity in the face of the U.S. threat, the equating of dissent with treason, are

themes that have suffused Cuban politics since 1959. When Oswaldo Paya’s Varela Project

successfully organized the fragmented dissident movement to collect 11,000 signatures calling

for a referendum on democratic change, the government’s response was to mobilize millions to

sign petitions calling for a constitutional amendment declaring socialism “untouchable.” The

government’s mobilization was framed not as a response to the Varela Project, however, but as a

response to George Bush’s May 20, 2002, ‘New Initiative for Cuba’ speech, in which he

promised a tougher U.S. policy lasting until Cuba abandoned its socialist system.146

In a spectacular show of its organizational muscle, the government’s mass organizations

mobilized over eight million people in just a few days to sign the petition. The drive was

launched with patriotic speeches and rallies on the 101st anniversary of the Platt Amendment. It

was, said Fidel, “a convincing and fitting response to the uninvited liberator, W. Bush.”147

Although many Cubans had at least some notion of the Varela Project (Jimmy Carter praised it

in his televised speech in Havana, which was reprinted in Granma), Cuban officials almost never

mentioned it, except to demean it as nothing more than a U.S. government plot. The Varela

organizers were “on the U.S. government payroll,” claimed Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez

Roque.148

During the months in which the dissident movement was gathering signatures on the

Varela petition, the U.S. Interests Section began to promote opposition activity more

aggressively. Shortly after Bush’s inauguration, Vicki Huddleston, the chief U.S. diplomat in

Havana, started handing out shortwave radios, especially to dissidents with whom she met

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periodically. She described her efforts as a new, “robust” outreach policy made possible by the

new administration in Washington. "Now I'm really able to push the envelope,” she explained.

Cuban officials protested that her behavior was improper, but to no avail. "This is sheer

intervention in our internal affairs," complained one official. "They did that in Eastern Europe,

and they think they have a right to do it in Cuba. We won't allow it.”149

When private protests brought no surcease, Castro himself publicly reproached the U.S.

diplomats, warning: “The U.S. government is also making a mistake if it expects that people

who work as hired hands of a foreign power will go unpunished…. Nor should he [Bush] think

that those who visit Cuba under some disguise or other to bring in money and to conspire openly

against the Revolution will find things easy; nor that officials of his Interest Section have any

right to run all over the country as they please...to organize rings of conspirators.” U.S.

diplomats were acting in ways inconsistent with their diplomatic status, Castro charged. “We

are not willing to allow our sovereignty to be violated or to allow the norms that govern

diplomatic behavior to be flouted in a humiliating manner.” He threatened to abrogate the

migration agreement with the United States and close the Interests Section.150

In September 2002, James Cason replaced Vicki Huddleston as head of the Interests

Section, and he took an even more outspoken public stance in support of the dissidents. He not

only met with them frequently, but he offered them the use of the Interests Section and his

residence for meetings. He attended meetings in their homes, including some to which the

international press was invited. He traveled around the island meeting with dissident groups in

far-flung towns. On March 6, in a speech to the National Assembly, Castro publicly condemned

Cason’s disparaging remarks about the Cuban government at a press conference held at the home

of prominent dissident Marta Beatriz Roque, calling it a “shameless and defiant provocation.”

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He repeated his threat, first made in June 2002, to close the Interests Section: “Cuba can easily

do without this office, a breeding ground for counterrevolutionaries and a command post for the

most offensive subversive actions against our country.” But he also speculated that perhaps the

Bush administration was intentionally trying to provoke him into severing what formal ties

existed between Washington and Havana.151

Rather than strike at the Interests Section, Castro struck at the dissidents. On March 18,

state security began rounding up dissidents across the island, charging them under both the 1996

Law for the Reaffirmation of Cuban Dignity and Sovereignty adopted in the wake of Helms-

Burton, and the 1999 Law for the Protection of Cuban National Independence and the Economy.

After summary trials closed to international observers, 75 of the accused were found guilty and

sentenced to long terms in prison, ranging from six to 28 years. At the trials, a number of

prominent, longstanding members of the dissident movement revealed themselves to be state

security agents who testified against the accused. The government insisted that the defendants

were not being jailed for opposing the government, but for conspiring seditiously with the

United States. Evidence introduced at the trials demonstrated that many of the accused had been

in close contact with the U.S. Interests Section and may have received material assistance of

various kinds either from the U.S. government or from U.S. organizations funded under

USAID’s democracy promotion programs.152

At first glance, the timing of the arrests was difficult to decipher. There was no obvious

reason to suddenly roll up the dissident movement’s leadership after having tolerated them

(albeit not without ongoing harassment) for several years. Some observers suggested that the

Cubans were using the war in Iraq as cover for the crackdown, but the timing was not really

fortuitous. The European Union had just opened an office in Havana and resumed discussions

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about admitting Cuba to the Cotonou Agreement providing trade preferences to former colonies-

-discussions broken off in 2002 because of Cuba’s unwillingness to accept EU human rights

conditionality. In Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) was on the

eve of its annual debate over Cuba’s human rights record, a debate that was a perennial

ideological battlefield between Washington and Havana. The Cubans took these debates very

seriously, even though the Commission had no enforcement power. To the Cubans, international

opinion as expressed through the United Nations represented an important bulwark against U.S.

attack. Finally, the arrest of the dissidents came just as the U.S. Congress was beginning to take

up a new round of legislative proposals to lift the travel ban and expand sales of food.

Predictably, the arrests touched off a firestorm of international protest and hurt Cuba’s

interests in all these venues. Surprisingly, however, the Bush administration’s reaction was

relatively mild. Bush took the opportunity to blast Castro rhetorically, but the two principal

responses discussed inside the administration--cutting off remittances and halting direct flights

to Cuba--were both opposed by the CANF. In the end, neither was adopted. Instead, the United

States expelled 14 Cuban diplomats for improper conduct, but did little else.153 Proponents of

free trade and travel admitted that Castro’s actions had dealt their cause a blow. "There is a

parallel here between this administration and the Castro government," said Congressman Bill

Delahunt (D-Mass). "They are both going backward."154

At root, the dissidents’ arrest reflected internal Cuban politics as much as foreign policy.

A confluence of events made Cuban officials particularly worried that the United States was

planning on using the dissidents to spearhead a more aggressive U.S. policy, and that this

strategy might be poised for success. After September 11, 2001, the Cuban economy dipped into

recession for the first time since 1994. The slump in international tourism reduced earnings

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from Cuba’s tourism industry, which had been the economy’s engine of growth in the 1990s.

The recession in the United States also hurt Cuba because Cuban-Americans in south Florida

(also a major tourist destination) could not afford to send as much money in remittances.

Finally, the declining world market price for sugar rendered much of Cuba’s sugar industry

uneconomical, and the government finally took the difficult decision to close a large portion of it

down for good.155

In the past, economic hardship has been a bellwether of discontent and increased

pressures for migration. The 1980 Mariel boatlift was preceded by recession, as was the 1994

rafters crisis. The rafters crisis was also accompanied by a series of hijackings, one of which

touched off the riot on the Malecon, the first overtly anti-government demonstration since 1961.

Since the 1995 U.S.-Cuban migration agreement, migration pressure in Cuba had been eased

somewhat by the orderly emigration of 20,000 Cubans annually to the United States. In 2002-

2003, however, the processing of visas for Cuban emigrants slowed dramatically. Five months

into the year, only 505 visas had been processed, compared to over 7,000 the year before. The

State Department explained the delays as a result of more elaborate screening procedures

adopted after September 11. The Cubans, however, were convinced that the Bush administration

was delaying the visas to shut off the safety value of migration, in the hope that discontent on the

island would boil over.156 There was precedent for that tactic. When Ronald Reagan came to

office in 1981, several thousand former political prisoners were awaiting visas to enter the

United States under an agreement negotiated by the Carter administration. Reagan halted the

processing.157

At the same time that the approval of visas slowed, the Bush administration warned the

Cubans that a migration crisis like 1980 or 1994 was “unacceptable,” and would be regarded as

47
“an act of war.”158 Nevertheless, Cubans who stole or hijacked boats and planes to get to Florida

were routinely paroled into the community and almost never prosecuted, thus creating no

disincentive for hijackers. A wave of hijacking attempts in early 2003 indicated that discontent

and migration pressures were rising in tandem with the economy's decline. To Fidel, it appeared

that the Bush administration was intentionally creating the conditions for a migration crisis that

could then be used as “a pretext for a military aggression against Cuba.”159 Anxious to halt the

hijackings, the government took the drastic step of executing three young men who tried

unsuccessfully to hijack a ferry to Miami.

One important difference between the 1980 and 1994 crises and the problems Cuba faced

in 2003 was the strength of the dissident movement. In 1980, there was none. In 1994, it was

minuscule, and its leaders were more often in jail than they were free. By 2003, however, the

government had lost its tight grip on civil society as a result of the economic and social changes

forced on Castro after the Soviet collapse. The Varela Project disproved the conventional

wisdom that Cuba’s dissidents were too fragmented to cooperate effectively, too few to have any

impact, and too isolated to reach out to anyone beyond their own immediate circle of family and

friends. The Project’s ability to get over 11,000 people to sign a petition that effectively

declared themselves in opposition to Cuba’s socialist system came as a shock to most observers,

and it must have been an even greater shock to Cuba’s leaders. The government’s massive

mobilization to preempt the Varela petition with one of its own was evidence of how seriously

the political elite regarded the challenge. Varela’s success implied that it might have the

potential to take advantage of growing discontent and channel it into political action. Moreover,

the Bush administration had openly declared its intention to strengthen the internal opposition,

48
had doubled U.S. AID funding for that purpose, and had given the Interests Section free rein to

publicly and aggressively embrace the dissidents and encourage them.

Washington's embrace of the dissidents proved to be the kiss of death. It enabled

prosecutors to portray the defendants as U.S. agents, thereby branding dissent as equivalent to

treason. Not only did the government demolish the dissident movement, it also sent a clear

warning to others who might be tempted to voice opposition to Castro's leadership. For Castro,

the point of the arrests was to project an image of strength and implacable determination to resist

U.S. pressure.

In September 2003, the House of Representatives voted, for the fourth year in a row, to

halt enforcement of the travel ban. The margin (227-188) was smaller than in 2002, but in light

of the nearly universal condemnation of the Cuban government’s imprisonment of dissidents the

previous spring, the resilience of the majority in favor of lifting the travel ban was surprising.160

A few weeks later, before the Senate took up the travel ban, President Bush publicly

reiterated his commitment to keep the ban in place and tighten its enforcement. Tourism would

only serve to "prop up the dictator and his cronies,” Bush argued, while feeding an “illicit sex

trade...encouraged by the Cuban government.” At the same time, the president announced the

creation off a Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, in order to “plan for Cuba's transition

from Stalinist rule to a free and open society, to identify ways to hasten the arrival of that

day.”161

On October 23, the treasury appropriations bill came to the Senate floor and Byron L.

Dorgan (D-N.D.) offered his amendment to halt enforcement of the travel ban, using exactly the

same language approved by the House of Representatives. Despite the president’s threaten to

veto any legislation easing travel to Cuba, the Senate overwhelmingly rejected the Republican

49
leadership’s effort to table Dorgan’s amendment, 59-36, and then adopted it. It was the first time

the Senate as a whole had voted on the issue since 1999, when the effort to end the travel ban

was defeated, 43-55. Thirteen Republicans switched sides in the interim.162

The House’s efforts to end the travel ban in 2001 and 2002 were blocked in conference

committee. Because there was no similar provision in the Senate version of the appropriations

bills, the Republican leadership had a ready-made excuse for dropping the Cuba provision

because the two bodies were “in disagreement.” In 2003, however, the House and Senate were

not in disagreement over Cuba; both had adopted identical language. Under Congress’ own

rules, a provision not in disagreement should not open to modification by the conference

committee. Fidelity to the rules, however, was not the Republican leadership’s strong suit. They

simply dropped the Cuba language from the bill, and the Republicans they appointed to serve on

the conference committee went along.163

By threatening to veto the treasury and transportation appropriation, President Bush won

a victory over the congressional majority that favored ending the travel ban to Cuba, thereby

solidifying his support among conservative Cuban-Americans in south Florida. His victory may

well have been Pyrrhic, however, because it generated considerable anger among the majority of

members whose will the president thwarted.

On May 6, 2004, just as the presidential campaign was heating up, President Bush

received the report of the Commission for Assistance to Free Cuba he had appointed in October.

Having taken no public testimony and consulted no one outside the administration other than the

most conservative Cuban-American legislators, the Commission reported a menu of options, all

of which had been circulating among conservative think tanks for years. Bush promptly accepted

them all. The unbashed aim of the Commission’s recommendations was to subvert the Cuban

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government, “to bring about an expeditious end to the Castro dictatorship.”164 The core strategy

was to constrict the flow of hard currency to Cuba in order to cripple the economy, stoke popular

discontent, and precipitate Castro’s collapse– the same familiar formula on which the embargo

was based and which had failed to succeed for forty-five years.

The first target was travel. As Congress was trying to make travel to Cuba easier, Bush’s

new regulations virtually eliminated university study programs in Cuba by requiring that they

last almost full semester. At the same time, the administration tightened restrictions on travel to

professional conferences in Cuba, and cut sharply the number of Cubans allowed to attend

conferences in the United States. The net result was to block the exchange of ideas between

Cuban professionals and their U.S. counterparts.

More significantly, Bush’s new restrictions severely limited the right of Cuban-

Americans to visit and support their families on the island. Whereas Cuban-Americans had been

allowed to make annual family visits under a general license (i.e., requiring no prior approval

from the Department of the Treasury) and more frequently in emergencies, the new regulations

required them to apply for an individual license for all trips and limited them to just one trip

every three years, only to visit immediate family members, with no exceptions for emergencies.

While visiting, they were restricted to spending only $50 dollars per day, thereby limiting their

purchases in Cuba’s dollar stores.

The largest flow of resources from the United States to Cuba is not from travel and

tourism but remittances. The Commission considered banning or cutting remittances across the

board, but to avoid a political uproar, it settled on more subtle restrictions designed to achieve

the same end. Under the new regulations, remittances may only be sent to immediate family

members, and no remittances or gifts packages can be sent to officials of the government,

51
Communist Party, or mass organizations– a population comprising tens if not hundreds of

thousands of people and their families. Finally, the Commission recommended increasing U.S.

aid to Cuban dissidents from $7 million to $29 million annually, and launching yet another effort

to bolster the signals of TV and Radio Martí by broadcasting from a military aircraft circling the

island just outside Cuban airspace.

The Cuban reaction to the new measures was immediate and intense. “This is the plan for

Cuba’s annexation and the return to the fake republic of the Platt Amendment,” declared the

Central Committee of the Communist Party, which then denounced the Bush administration as

“cunning, cynical and cruel.”165 On May 14, a million Cubans marched past the U.S. Interests

Section in Havana to protest the new measures, and Castro declared himself ready “to die

fighting in defense of my homeland.”166 On a more practical level, the government closed the

dollar stores temporarily and raised prices on most goods dramatically in order to conserve hard

currency.167

The timing and thrust of the new regulations was nakedly political. Having come under

attack by the Cuban Liberty Council for being soft on Cuba– all talk and no action– President

Bush sought to consolidate his conservative Cuban-American base by embracing a set of

sanctions that they had been loudly advocating for years. The electoral calculus was more

complex, however. Because so many of the new measures restricted Cuban-Americans’ ability to

remain in contact with and assist their families on the island, a significant part of the community

spoke out publicly against them. Even the Cuban American National Foundation criticized the

restrictions on travel and remittances.168 A poll sponsored by the Southwest Voter Registration

Education Project found that although a majority of Cuban-Americans supported most of Bush’s

new measures, significant minorities opposed them: 37% were against reducing the number of

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family visits to one of every three years; 41% opposed limiting visits to immediate family; and a

majority, 64% were against the prohibition on emergency visits. Overall 37% said the measures

gave them doubts about Bush’s commitment to the Cuban-American community. Only 66% said

they would vote for Bush for re-election (compared with 16% for John Kerry), even though Bush

received 82% of the Cuban vote in 2000.169 Senator Kerry sought to address this division among

Cuban-Americans by voicing a commitment to democracy in Cuba together with criticism of

Bush’s policy because of the hardship it imposed on Cubans and Cuban-Americans.170

Whichever of these electoral strategies proved more effective, one thing was certain: for the third

election in a row, policy toward Cuba was driven almost entirely by domestic U.S. presidential

politics.

Conclusion

In 2003, a transition was already well underway in Cuba--from a centrally planned

economy insulated from the world market by its membership in the socialist camp to an

economy responsive, by necessity, to markets forces, both internal and external. The long term

political implications of this economic transformation were as yet unclear. Cuba’s leaders hoped

to follow the path blazed by China and Vietnam, in which economic reform was combined with

continuing political hegemony for the Communist Party. But they feared the fate of Eastern

Europe and the Soviet Union where reform led to political disintegration.

This strategy of accommodating economic reality while trying to maintain political

control had significant foreign policy implications. The economic imperative was to foster

better relations with Cuba’s principal trading partners and, of course, the largest potential

partner, the United States. The political imperative was to isolate the polity somehow from the

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corrosive political effects of greater economic openness. More travel and tourism meant more

potential for ideological ‘contamination’ and anger over ‘tourist apartheid’. More foreign direct

investment meant reduced control over development priorities. In the case of the United States,

this conundrum was further complicated by the long history of U.S. hegemony over the island,

the revolutionary leadership’s pride at having rescued Cuba from that hegemony, and

Washington’s ongoing determination to restore it by replacing the Cuban regime with a pro-U.S.

democracy. As Castro himself said, the Revolution was largely defenseless in the face of U.S.

power, except for the ‘battle of ideas’, the determination of Cubans to preserve their

revolutionary achievements. In that sense, Fidel Castro’s struggle to maintain Cuba’s

sovereignty and independence from the United States was at root a struggle for the hearts and

minds of the Cuban people. And for that reason, dissidents, especially those who identified and

associated with the United States, were seen as traitors.

On both sides of the Florida Straits, policymakers shared the same uncertainties about the

interplay of political and economic forces. In Washington, they debated whether the economic

changes underway on the island would catalyze political change or would simply strengthen the

government by enhancing economic growth. With this dynamic in mind, U.S. policy was

designed to limit contacts to those that would have the most destabilizing effects while providing

the fewest economic resources for the government.171 In Havana, policymakers debated the

same issue in different terms: whether the economic transition would reinforce their legitimacy

by boosting growth or would corrode party control. In the realm of foreign policy, this

uncertainty translated into a deep ambivalence, especially regarding the United States. Improved

relations held the promise of economic bounty, but also the potential poison pill of resurgent

U.S. hegemony. Improved relations meant a reduced risk of attack, but also the loss of the

54
Revolution’s symbolic enemy, around which Fidel had so often and so effectively rallied the

Cuban people to his side. The future of U.S.-Cuban relations depended upon how long the

economic forces pulling the two countries together could be resisted by the hardliners in each

camp who feared the domestic political consequences of closer relations.

Cuba’s broader diplomatic and economic relations were also deeply affected by the

bilateral relationship with the United States. Although no major country in the world supported

Washington’s policy of hostility and pressure against Cuba, relations between Havana and

Canada, Europe, and Latin America repeatedly proved vulnerable to flare-ups in relations with

Washington. At moments of heightened tension, Latin and Atlantic allies might disagree with

U.S. Cuba policy, but the issue was never important enough for them to put their own bilateral

relations with Washington at risk. The Cubans were inclined to see this pragmatism on the part

of Europe and Latin America as a lack of principal and to say so publicly, uncouched by

diplomatic niceties.

Serious friction arose with Canada in 2001, when Castro denounced Prime Minister Jean

Chrétien for giving in to U.S. pressure to exclude Cuba from the Third Summit of the

Americas.172 In 2002 Castro blasted Mexican President Vicente Fox and Foreign Minister Jorge

Castenada when he was asked to leave a 2002 United Nations development summit in Monterrey

because President George Bush refused to attend if Castro was present.173 In 2003, when Cuba

arrested and imprisoned scores of dissidents for receiving U.S. support, Castro responded to

European criticism by accusing the E.U. of being Washington’s pawn, and then leading a million

protestors to the Spanish and Italian embassies.174 In short, Cuba’s diplomatic relations with

both Latin America and Europe tend to be held hostage by Havana’s conflict with Washington.

Despite the need for Cuba to cultivate good relations with these continents, Castro cannot quite

55
forgive them for being the friends of his enemy and refusing to forsake their friendship with

Washington over the issue of Cuba.

As of 2003, U.S. policy toward Cuba was in flux. In office was a president as hostile to

Fidel Castro as any since Ronald Reagan, in part because of the predominance of Reagan

veterans in his foreign policy apparatus. But the political dynamics underlying the policy were

changing, as evidenced by the sharp turnabout in Congress since the passage of Helms-Burton in

1996. Despite Bush’s visceral dislike of the Cuban regime and his close political alliance with

the most hardline elements of the Cuban-American community in Miami, he was constrained in

his ability to intensify sanctions against Cuba by farm state Republicans by Republican

businessmen, and by moderate Cuban-Americans. “At some point,” Congressman Jeff Flake

observed, “farm-state politics trumps Florida politics.”175

56
 ENDNOTES

1. Wayne S. Smith, The Closest of Enemies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.

2. Martí letter to Manuel Mercado, May 18, 1895, quoted in Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting
Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2001, p.13.

3. Report, William D. Rogers to Henry Kissinger, “Cuba Policy After the OASGA
[Organization of American States General Assembly],” May 17, 1975, quoted in “Dialogue with
Castro: A Hidden History,” edited by Peter Kornbluh and James Blight, New York Review of
Books, October 6, 1994.

4. The Cuban-American lobby’s influence is documented extensively in Morris Morley and

Chris McGillion, Unfinished Business: America and Cuba After the Cold War, 1989-2001.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

5. Mark Silva, “VP Pick Makes Foundation's Choice Less Clear,” Miami Herald, August
9, 2000 [Online edition, hereafter OE]

6. Peter H. Stone, "Cuban Clout," National Journal, February 20, 1993, pp.449-453; John
Newhouse, “A Reporter at Large: Cuba,” New Yorker, April 27, 1992; Paul J. Kiger, Squeeze
Play: The United States, Cuba, and the Helms-Burton Act. Washington, DC: Center for
Public Integrity, 1997, pp.28-44, 76; Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, "The Role of
Ethnic Interest Groups in US Foreign Policy: The Case of the Cuban American National
Foundation," International Studies Quarterly, Vol.43, 1999, pp. 341-361.

7. William Watts, The United States and Cuba: Changing Perceptions, New Policies?
Washington, DC: Potomac Associates and Johns Hopkins University, 1989, p.9; Press Release,
“Carter Trip to Cuba Reflects U.S. Sentiment: Engagement Supported by American People,
Congress,” Cuba Policy Foundation, Washington, D.C., May 10, 2002.

8. U.S. Department of State, “Fact Sheet: Humanitarian Assistance to Cuba,” September 7,

2001; ”Humanitarian Assistance,” November 8, 1999.

9. “Cubans Complain Sanctions Are Hitting Them While Missing Mark of Castro,”
Baltimore Sun, September 2, 1994 [OE].

10. Sergio Díaz-Briquets and Jorge F. Pérez-López, “Refugee Remittances: Conceptual

Issues and the Cuban and Nicaraguan Experiences,” International Migration Review, Vol. 31,
No. 2, Summer 1997, pp.411-437.

11. Morley and McGillion, Unfinished Business, pp. 71-81; Jon Nordheimer, "Cuban Group
Forges Link to Clinton," New York Times, August 26, 1994 [OE]; William Booth, “Tighter

57
Policy Exposes a Rip in Anti-Castro Fabric,” Washington Post, August 24, 1994 [OE].

12. Jonathan P. Decker, “Smuggling Cash to Cuba Rises in Defiance of Embargo,”

Christian Science Monitor, May 24, 1995 [OE].

13. Juan O. Tamayo, ”Cuban Economy Abominable in 1998,” Miami Herald, July 9, 1999
[OE].

14. See Preliminary Results, Florida International University (FIU) Cuba Poll 2000
(Miami: FIU Institute for Public Opinion Research, October 2000); Guillermo J. Grenier and
Hugh Gladwin, FIU 1997 Cuba Poll (Miami: FIU Institute for Public Opinion Research, 1997)
The FIU has conducted polls of the Cuban-American community every few years since 1991.

15. See Preliminary Results, FIU Cuba Poll 2000.

16. Rebecca J. Fowler, “Cash Flow to Cuba Barred,” Washington Post, August 21, 1994
[OE]. For a detailed look at the links between Cubans abroad and family on the island, see Susan
Eckstein and Lorena Barberia, “Grounding Immigrant Generations in History: Cuban Americans
and Their Transnational Ties,” International Migration Review, Vol.36, No.3, 2002, pp.799-
838.

17. Max Castro, “Transition and the Ideology of Exile,” in Miguel Angel Centeno and
Mauricio Font, eds. Toward a New Cuba: Legacies of a Revolution. Boulder: Lynne Rienner,
1997, pp.91-108.

18. Richard Boudreaux and Mark Fineman, “Catholic Leaders See the Start of New Cuban
Era,” Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1998 [OE]; Mike Clary, “Pope's Cuba Visit Fosters
Attitude Shift,” Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1998 [OE].

19. Guy Gugliotta, “Cuban American Foundation Is Determined Not to Founder After Loss
of Its Leader,” Washington Post, January 21, 1998 [OE].

20. See, for example, Eunice Ponce and Elaine De Valle, “Mania over Elián Rising,” Miami
Herald, January 10, 2000 [OE]

21. Oscar Corral, “Elián Custody Case Unites Miami’s Cuban-Americans,” Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel, April 23, 2000 [OE].

22. David W. Moore, “Americans Approve of U.S. Government Decision to Return Boy to
Cuba,” Gallup News Service Poll Releases, January 12, 2000; Frank Newport, “Majority
Support for Elián Raid Continues, Even Though Public Disapproves of Method,” Gallup News
Service Poll Releases, May 2, 2000.

23. Mireidy Fernandez et al., “Polls Show Americans Split on Using Force: Most Backed
Reunion of Father and Son,” Miami Herald, April 25, 2000 [OE]; “Most Say Elián Belongs
with Dad,” Miami Herald April 4, 2000 [OE].

58
24. Karen Branch, “Penelas Put Himself into Prominent Spot with Tough Talk,” Miami
Herald, March 31, 2000 [OE].

25. Alfonso Chardy, “Cuban-American Leaders Aim to Separate Local Issues, Castro,”
Miami Herald, May 5, 2000 [OE].

26. Quoted in Don Finefrock, “Businessman Criticizes Fellow Cubans,” Miami Herald,
April 28, 2000 [OE].

27. Morley and McGillion, Unfinished Business, pp. 158-163; Scott Wilson, “In Miami,
Cuban Exile Group Shifts Focus,” Washington Post, September 14, 2000 [OE].

28. Alan Sayre, “U.S. Ships Food to Cuba for Hurricane Relief,” Miami Herald, December
17, 2001 [OE]; Carol Rosenberg, “Pair Asked Bush to Block Carter’s Trip,” Miami Herald,
May 7, 2002 [OE].

29. Christopher Marquis, “U.S. May Punish Cuba for Imprisoning Critics,” New York
Times, April 17, 2003 [OE].

30. Dana Canedy, “Cuban Exile Group Split as Hard-Liners Resign From Board,” New York
Times, August 8, 2001 [OE].

31. Jorge F. Pérez-López, “The Cuban Economic Crisis of the 1990s and the External
Sector,” Cuba in Transition (Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy), Vol.8, 1998,
pp.386-413; Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, “Foreign Direct Investment in Cuba,” in Pedro
Monreal (ed), Development Perspectives in Cuba: An Agenda in the Making. University of
London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2002, pp.47-68.

32. Quoted in Karen DeYoung, “U.S. Businesses Encouraged to Explore Trade With Cuba,”
Washington Post, July 28, 1999 [OE].

33. Thomas W. Lippman, “Business Groups Urge Clinton to Disallow Suits Over Seized
Property in Cuba,” Washington Post, July 6, 1996 [OE].

34. Louis Uchitelle, “Who's Punishing Whom? Trade Bans Are Boomerangs, U.S.
Companies Say,” New York Times, September 11, 1996 [OE].

35. Thomas W. Lippman, “Business-Led Coalition Urges U.S. to Relax Embargo on Cuba,”
Washington Post, January 14, 1998 [OE]; Tim Weiner, “Pope vs. Embargo,” New York Times,
January 21, 1998 [OE].

36. Tim Weiner, “Anti-Castro Exiles Won Limit on Changes,” New York Times, January 6,
1999 [OE]. The Commission’s web site describes its intended agenda.

37. Council on Foreign Relations, U.S.-Cuban Relations in the 21st Century. New York,
1999. The Cuba Policy Foundation closed its door in 2003, partly for financial reasons and partly

59
in reaction to Castro’s arrest of 75 dissidents.

38. Quoted in Gugliotta, “Cuban American Foundation Is Determined Not to Founder After
Loss of Its Leader”

39. Quoted in Weiner, “Pope vs. Embargo”

40. Steven A. Holmes and Lizette Alvarez, “Senate Approves Easing Sanctions on Food to
Cuba,” New York Times, October 19, 2000 [OE]; Editorial, “Chaos Reigns in U.S. Politics,”
Granma (Havana), October 16, 2000. English translation provided by the Cuban Interests
Section, Washington, DC.

41. Quoted in Miles A. Pomper, “Sentiment Grows for Ending Cuba Embargo, But
Opponents Say Bush Will Stand Firm,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report (hereafter
CQWR), February 9, 2002, p. 408.

42. U.S. Department of State, Office of International Information Programs, “Transcript:

Bush Signals Support for Sending Aid to Dissidents in Cuba; President Celebrates Cuban
Independence Day at the White House,” May 18, 2001.

43. “Statement: Toward a Democratic Cuba, July 13, 2001,” Weekly Compilation of
Presidential Documents: Administration of George W. Bush. Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 2001, pp.1036-1037.

44. Title III enables U.S. citizens, including naturalized Cuban-Americans, to sue foreign
firms in U.S. courts for ‘trafficking’ in property seized from the U.S. citizens by the Cuban
government. Christopher Marquis, “Bush Forgoes Trying to Bar Cuba Deals By Foreigners,”
New York Times, July 17, 2001 [OE].

45. Quoted in Ginger Thompson, “Cuba, Too, Felt the Sept. 11 Shock Waves, With a More
Genial Castro Offering Help,” New York Times, February 7, 2002 [OE].

46. Mark P. Sullivan, Cuba: U.S. Restrictions on Travel and Legislative Initiatives.
Library of Congress: Congressional Research Service, February 24, 2003, p.5.

47. “Americans Who Make Trips to Cuba Without Ok Could Be Prosecuted,” Houston
Chronicle, March 02, 2003; Sullivan, Cuba: U.S. Restrictions on Travel and Legislative
Initiatives. As of mid-2003, enforcement data for 2002 had not been released.

48. David D. Kirkpatrick, “U.S. Halts Cuba Access by Educational Groups,” New York
Times, May 4, 2003 [OE].

49. Andrea Elliott and Elaine De Valle, “Cuban Community Split on Policy,” Miami
Herald, February 13, 2003 [OE].

60
50. Tracey Eaton, “Travel Permits Harder to Come by under Bush Administration,” Dallas
Morning News, March 23, 2003 [OE].

51. Nancy San Martin, “U.S. Food Sales to Cuba Far Exceed Planned Amount,” Miami
Herald, April 3, 2002 [OE]; David Segal, “Visa Delays Cost Cuban Musicians; Law Keeps 22
From Latin Grammys,” Washington Post, September 19, 2002 [OE]; Burton Bollag, “Closing
the Gates: A Cuban Scholar Shut Out,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 11, 2003.

52. Flake amendment in Congressional Record, July 25, 2001, H4598, H4607; Rangel
amendment in Congressional Record, July 25, 2001, H 4604-4608.

53. Quoted in Keith Perine, “Conferees Purge Controversial Items From Treasury-Postal
Service Bill,” CQWR, October 27, 2001, p. 2548.

54. The next few paragraphs are adapted from William M. LeoGrande and Julie M. Thomas,
"Cuba's Quest for Economic Independence," Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol.34, No.2,
May 2002, pp.325-363.

55 Juan Triana Cordovi, “Cuba’s Economic Transformation and Conflict with the United
States,” in Victor Bulmer-Thomas and James Dunkerley, eds The United States and Latin
America: The New Agenda. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp.247-266; Richard
Garfield and Sarah Santana, “The Impact of the Economic Crisis and the US Embargo on Health
in Cuba,” American Journal of Public Health, January 1997, pp.15-20.

56. On the political maneuvers that led to Helms-Burton’s passage, see Morley and
McGillion, Unfinished Business, pp. 98-130.

57. U.S. International Trade Commission, The Economic Impact of U.S. Sanctions with
Respect to Cuba, chapter 5, passim. This report estimates that U.S. producers could capture as
much as 80-90 percent of the Cuban market for imported wheat, rice and feed grains because of
the cost differential.

58. Under the 1992 law, licenses for medical supplies would only be granted if the U.S.
government could verify that the supplies were being used appropriately, a stipulation the Cuban
government rejected. Under the 2000 law, Cuba was denied any U.S. government or private
sector financing to purchase food or medicine. This financial straightjacket meant that the
practical effect of lifting the food and medicine embargo was nil, and the Cuban government
denounced the measure as a fraud. See Editorial, “Chaos Reigns in U.S. Politics,” Granma,
October 16, 2000.

59. Garfield and Santana, “The Impact of the Economic Crisis and the U.S. Embargo on
Health in Cuba,” pp.15-21; Gustavo C. Roman, “Epidemic Neuropathy in Cuba: A Public Health
Problem Related to the Cuban Democracy Act of the United States,” Neuroepidemiology,
Vol.17, No.3, 1998, pp.1111-116; American Association for World Health, Denial of Food and
Medicine: The Impact of the U.S. Embargo on Health and Nutrition in Cuba. Washington,
D.C., March 1997; “The Politics of Suffering: The Impact of the U.S. Embargo on the Health of

61
the Cuban People, Report to the American Public Health Association of a Fact-Finding Trip to
Cuba, June 6-11, 1993,” Journal of Public Health Policy, Vol.15, No.1, Spring 1994, pp.86-
107.

60. U.S. International Trade Commission, The Economic Impact of U.S. Sanctions with
Respect to Cuba, pp.4-5, 4-21. The American Association of Travel Agents has a much higher
estimate: one million U.S. tourists going to Cuba the first year after sanctions are lifted, rising to
as many as 5 million annually. See Appendix to the above report, D-31.

61. Address by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Council of State and the Council of
Ministers of the Republic of Cuba, at the Opening Session of the Group of 77 South Summit
Conference, Havana, April 12, 2000.

62. See, for example, Speech by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Republic of Cuba,
Opening Ceremony of the First National Olympics of Cuban Sport, Plaza de la Revolución.
November 26, 2002.

63. Raúl Castro, “The Political and Social Situation in Cuba and the Corresponding Tasks of
the Party,” Granma International (digital), March 27, 1996.

64. Deborah Ramirez, “Exiles End Conference by Meeting Castro Focus on Bid to Ease
Travel, Investment,” The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec), April 25, 1994 [OE]; Howard W. French,
“Havana Woos Exiles, Easing Visits and Dangling Financial Carrot,” New York Times, April
25, 1994 [OE].

65. Quoted in David Adams, “Exiles Meet Cuban Officials,” St. Petersburg Times,
September 11, 1994 [OE].

66. They were Alfredo Duran of the Cuban Committee for Democracy, Ramon Cernuda of
the Coordination Committee of Human Rights Organizations, and Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, of
Cambio Cubano (Cuban Change).

67. Larry Rohter, “In Move to Improve Relations With Exiles in U.S., Cuba Eases the Way
for Investment,” New York Times, November 7, 1995 [OE].

68. Anita Snow, “Cuba Postpones Immigration Conference,” Associated Press, April 4,
2003; Jean Guy Allard, “Washington Hampering Relations Between Cubans at Home and
Abroad,” Granma International Digital, May 19, 2004.

69. Sullivan, Cuba: U.S. Restrictions on Travel and Legislative Initiatives, p.5.

70. Quoted in Tim Johnson, “U.S. Farmers Elated Over Cuba Trade,” Miami Herald,
November 16, 2001 [OE]; Holger Jensen, “Cuban Embargo: Close, but No Cigar,” Rocky
Mountain News (Denver) March 12, 2001 [OE]

62
71. Tim Johnson, “Cuba Declines U.S. Aid, Wants to Pay for Relief,” Miami Herald,
November 10, 2001 [OE]; Johnson, “U.S. Farmers Elated Over Cuba Trade”

72. Martin Merzer, “Isidore eyes Mexico; 800 Cuban homes hit,” Miami Herald, September
21, 2002 [OE]; Kevin Sullivan, “After the Storm, Cubans Survey Losses,” Washington Post,
November 7, 2001 [OE]; Vivian Sequera, “Cuba, Hit Hard by Michelle, Turns to Task of
Recovery,” Boston Globe, November 7, 2001 [OE].

73. “Four U.S. Companies Sign the First Trade Deals With Cuba,” New York Times,
November 22, 2001 [OE].

74. “Food, Drug Industries Size up Cuba Market,” Miami Herald, January 25, 2002 [OE].

75. Juan O. Tamayo, “Report Cites U.S. Benefits of Cuba Trade,” Miami Herald, January
28. 2002 [OE]; Tim Johnson, “U.S. Support of Embargo on Cuba Is Holding--but for How
Long?,” Miami Herald, December 22, 2002 [OE].

76. Quoted in Patrick Michael Rucker, “Americans Prising Open Cuban Trade Door,”
Financial Times (London), October 1, 2002 [OE].

77. Quoted in James Flanigan, “U.S. Business Likes Cuba, but Obstacles Remain,” Los
Angeles Times, May 15, 2002 [OE]; David Gonzalez, “Cuba Receives U.S. Shipment, First
Purchase Since Embargo,” New York Times, December 17, 2001 [OE]; Kevin Sullivan, “At
Havana Trade Show, They're Talkin' Turkey,” Washington Post, September 26, 2002 [OE].

78. Christopher Marquis, “U.S. Is Reportedly Prepared To Allow Food Sales to Cuba,” New
York Times, November 15, 2001 [OE]; Tim Johnson, “Freighter Leaving for Cuba with U.S.
Corn,” Miami Herald, December 14, 2001 [OE].

79. Quoted in Elaine Del Valle, “Q&A - Veteran Leader Speaks about Dissidents, Castro and
the U.S. Role,” Miami Herald, March 3, 2002 [OE].

80. Kevin Diaz, “Ventura Puts Another Bite in Cuba Embargo,” Star Tribune
(Minneapolis), September 24, 2002 [OE]; “Castro Surprises Pensacola Group,” St. Petersburg
Times, September 11, 2002 [OE]; Jennifer Babson, “Economic Links Aim of Cuba Visits,”
Miami Herald, August 11, 2002 [OE]; Kevin Diaz, “Politics Will Ride with Governor on Trade
Trip to Cuba, Star Tribune, September 22, 2002 [OE].

81. E. A. Torriero, “Farm Group’s Trip to Cuba Hits Federal Roadblock,” Washington Post,
January 6, 2002 [OE].

82. Glenn Kessler and Karen DeYoung, “U.S. Moves to Expel 4 Cuban Diplomats,”
Washington Post, November 06, 2002 [OE]. Montes was the senior analyst covering Cuba at
the Defense Intelligence Agency. She was arrested in October 2001 and pled guilty to espionage
on behalf of Cuba in March 2002.

63
83. Quoted in Rob Hotakainen, “Administration Advises Ventura: Don't Visit Cuba,” Star
Tribune, September 7, 2002 [OE]; Mark Brunswick, “Ventura Seeks White House Apology,”
Star Tribune, September 10, 2002 [OE].

84. Quoted in Nancy San Martin, “U.S. Official Dampens Trade-show Enthusiasm with Talk
of Cuban Credit,” Miami Herald, September 29, 2002 [OE]; Sullivan, “At Havana Trade Show,
They're Talkin' Turkey”

85. Patrick Michael Rucker, “Americans Prising Open Cuban Trade Door”

86. Quoted in Karen DeYoung, “U.S. Food Sale Is Hailed by Cuban Minister 'Positive
Gesture' Could Aid Relations, He Says,” Washington Post, November 29, 2001 [OE].

87. Quoted in Craig Gilbert, “Cuba Woos Heart of U.S. with Trade,” Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel, August 18, 2002 [OE].

88. Ginger Thompson with Clifford Krauss, “Antiwar Fever Puts Mexico In Quandary On
Iraq Vote,” New York Times, February 28, 2003 [OE]; Larry Rohter, “Chile Feels the Weight
of Its Security Council Seat,” New York Times, March 11, 2003 [OE].

89. Glenn Kessler, “Powell Pledges More Support For Colombia's Anti-Rebel War,”
”Washington Post, December 5, 2002 [OE].

90. “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the
Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” September 20, 2001, Weekly Compilation of Presidential
Documents: Administration of George W. Bush. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 2001, pp.1347-1351.

91. See, for example, the questions asked of Secretary of State Powell by House members
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ), in “Recent Developments in the
International Campaign Against Terrorism,” Hearing of the House International Relations
Committee, October 24, 2001, Federal News Service.

92. Soviet leaders told Raúl Castro in 1980 that Cuba would have to be prepared to defend
itself in the event of a U.S. attack. “La URSS nos abandono en 1980: Raúl Castro Ruz,” El Sol
de Mexico, April 22, 1993.

93. U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Verification and Compliance, World Military
Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1999-2000. Washington DC, 2002, Table 1.

94. Juan Carlos Espinosa, “Vanguard of the State:The Cuba Armed Forces in Transition,”
Problems of Post-Communism, Vol.48, No.6, November-December 2001, pp.19-30; Richard
L. Millet, “From Triumph to Survival: Cuba’s Armed Forces in an Era of Transition,” in Richard
L. Millet and Michael Gold-Biss, eds. Beyond Praetorianism: The Latin American Military
in Transition. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996, pp.133-156.

64
95. U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, “The Cuban Threat to U.S.
National Security,” Defense Department website.

96. Text of the Cuban message is quoted in speech by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz “None of the
Present World Problems Can Be Solved with the Use of Force,” September 11, 2001.

97. Speech by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, Havana, September 22, 2001.

98. Statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “The Cuban Government Submits to the
United States a Set of Proposals for Bilateral Agreements on Migratory Issues, Cooperation in
Drug Interdiction and a Program to Fight Terrorism,” March 17, 2002,
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/documentos/index.html.

99. Andres Oppenheimer and Tim Johnson, “U.S. Policy on Cuba to Receive Full Review,”
Miami Herald, March 8, 2002 [OE]; Tim Johnson, “Reich Vows to Defend Cuba Embargo,”
Miami Herald, March 13, 2002 [OE].

100. Bush gave two speeches on May 20, 2002, “Remarks Announcing the Initiative for a
New Cuba, Washington, D.C., and “Remarks on the 100th Anniversary of Cuban Independence,
Miami, Florida,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents: Administration of George
W. Bush. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2002, pp.852-858.

101. Speech, Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, President of the Republic of Cuba, Extraordinary Session
of the National Assembly of People’s Powe, Havana, June 26, 2002; Remarks, Dr. Fidel Castro
Ruz, at A Rally Held in General Antonio Maceo Square. Santiago De Cuba, June 8, 2002.

102. Kevin Sullivan, “U.S. Is Urged to Remove Cuba From List of Terror Sponsors,”
Washington Post, September 29, 2001; Anya K. Landau and Wayne S. Smith, Keeping Things
in Perspective: Cuba and the Question of International Terrorism, Center for International
Policy, November 20, 2001; Phil Peters, Cuba, the Terrorism List, and What the United
States Should Do, Lexington Institute, November 20, 2001.

103. On-the-record presentation by Richard Nuccio at a panel, “Cuba’s Presence on the State
Department’s List of Countries Supporting Terrorism,” Georgetown University, Washington,
DC October 11, 2001. See also, Maya Bell, “Experts Debate Taking Cuba off Terrorism List,”
Orlando Sentinel, April 7, 2002 [OE].

104. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Patterns of
Global Terrorism, 2001, Washington, D.C., May 21, 2002).

105. For a detailed refutation of the State Department’s accusations, see Wayne Smith, “CIP
Challenges State Department's List of Terrorist States,” Center for International Policy, May 24,
2002; Anya K. Landau and Wayne S. Smith, Cuba on the Terrorist List: In Defense of the
Nation or Domestic Political Calculation?, Center for International Policy, November 2002.

65
106. Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (P.L. 87-195), Sec. 620A. Prohibition on Assistance to
Governments Supporting International Terrorism, Legislation on Foreign Relations Through
2001, Senate Print 107-65, Committee on Foreign Relations and Committee on International
Relations, pp.293-295.

107. John R. Bolton, “Beyond the Axis of Evil: Additional Threats from Weapons of Mass
Destruction,” Remarks to the Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC, May 6, 2002

108. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Technologies Underlying Weapons

of Mass Destruction, OTA-BP-ISC-115. Washington, D.C., December 1993, pp. 85, 237.

109. Quoted in Juan O. Tamayo, "U.S. Downplays Rumors of Cuban Germ Missiles," Miami
Herald, February 4, 1997 [OE]. Prendez also claimed that the Cuban Center for Genetic
Engineering and Biotechnology was secretly a military installation producing biological
weapons, a charge that was disproved when the Center’s research director, José de la Fuente,
defected in 1999.

110. Ken Alibek, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological
Weapons Program in the World. New York: Random House, 2000, pp.273-277.

111. Quoted in Juan O. Tamayo, “U.S. Skeptical of Report on Cuban Biological Weapons,”
Miami Herald, June 23, 1999 [OE].

112. The unclassified report’s section on biological weapons read: “Cuba's current scientific
facilities and expertise could support an offensive BW program in at least the research and
development stage. Cuba's biotechnology industry is one of the most advanced in emerging
countries and would be capable of producing BW agents.” U.S. Department of Defense, Defense
Intelligence Agency, “The Cuban Threat to U.S. National Security.” One press report quoted a
classified annex to the DOD report that went a step further: “According to sources within Cuba,
at least one research site is run and funded by the Cuban military to work on the development of
offensive and defensive biological weapons.” Quoted in Martin Arostegui, "Fidel Castro's
Deadly Secret: Five BioChem Warfare Labs," Washington Times Insight Magazine, July 20,
1998 [OE]. In his Heritage Foundation speech, Bolton belittled the DOD report for playing down
the Cuban threat because the lead analyst in preparing it was Ana Belen Montes, who
subsequently plead guilty to spying for Cuba. The report, however, was the product not just of
DIA, but of the entire intelligence community.

113. Powell ’s statement from U.S. Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, “Powell
Says Cuba Has Biological Weapons Research Capacity,” May 13, 2002. Rumsfeld quoted in
U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere,
Peace Corps and Narcotics Affairs, Cuba’s Pursuit of Biological Weapons: Fact Or Fiction?,
107th Cong., 2nd Sess., June 5, 2002, p.13.

114. For a careful look at the evidence on Cuba’s alleged bio-weapons program, see Anya
Landau and Wayne Smith, “CIP Challenges Bolton on Cuba Bio-Terror Charges,” Press
Release, Center for International Policy, May 8, 2002; Landau and Smith, “CIP Special Report

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on Cuba and Bioweapons: Groundless Allegations Squander U.S. Credibility on Terrorism,”
Press Release, Center for International Policy, July 12, 2002

115. Prepared Statement of Carl W. Ford, Jr. before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
“Reducing the Threat of Chemical and Biological Weapons,” March 19, 2002, Federal News
Service. Ford said Cuba had “at least a limited, developmental offensive biological warfare
research and development effort.”

116. U.S. Congress, Cuba’s Pursuit of Biological Weapons: Fact Or Fiction?, pp.15, 32.

117. Ibid., p.36. Bolton’s other charge was that Cuba provided dual use biomedical technology
to “rogue states.” Cuba itself acknowledged exporting biomedical technology to 14 countries,
with contracts pending in 10 others. Only one, Iran, was by U.S. terms a “rogue state.”
(Response from Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz to the Statements Made by the United States Government
on Biological Weapons, Granma International (digital), May 11, 2002). There was no
evidence that Iran was using Cuban technology to produce biological weapons. The trade
relationship by itself triggered U.S. concerns, as Carl Ford explained: “The connection with
biological weapons with Iran and other places is based on simply the fact that they are involved
in economic, commercial relations with Iran on biomedical devices, capabilities, and research.”
U.S. Congress, Cuba’s Pursuit of Biological Weapons: Fact Or Fiction?, p.41).

118. Ibid., p.35. De la Fuente is quoted in Tim Johnson, “Talk of Cuba's Germ Warfare
Potential Could Affect Embargo,” Miami Herald, May 7, 2002 [OE].

119. Tim Johnson, “U.S. Rejects Carter's Plea to End Embargo on Cuba,” Miami Herald,
May 16, 2002 [OE].

120. The five were the original ‘axis of evil’ (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea) plus the other two
countries Bolton denounced in his Heritage Foundation speech (Syria and Libya). Judith Miller,
“U.S. Publicly Accusing 5 Countries of Violating Germ-Weapons Treaty,” New York Times,
November 19, 2001 [OE].

121. Tim Johnson, “Talk of Cuba's Germ Warfare Potential Could Affect Embargo,” Miami
Herald, May 7, 2002 [OE].

122. David Gonzalez, “Carter and Powell Cast Doubt on Bioarms in Cuba,” New York
Times, May 14, 2002 [OE].

123. Castro responded to Bolton in two speeches: “Key Address by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz at
the Open Forum Held in Sancti Spiritus Province, May 25, 2002,” and “Response from Dr. Fidel
Castro Ruz to the Statements Made by the United States Government on Biological Weapons,”
May 11, 2002.

124. Congressional Record, July 23, 2002, H5267.

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125. Congressional Record, July 23, 2002, H5267-H5273, H5291-H5306. Also see Andrew
Taylor, “Travel to Cuba, Contract Quotas Draw Veto Threat on Spending Bill,” CQWR, July
20, 2002, p.1952; Taylor, “Bush May Christen His Veto Pen On Treasury-Postal Spending Bill,”
CQWR, July 27, 2002, p. 2053.

126. Quoted in Ibid.

127. Quoted in Edward Epstein, “Retiring Armey Holds Nothing Back; Candor Resonates
Across House Aisle,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 2002 [OE].

128. Joseph J. Schatz, “Fiscal '03 Spending Omnibus Struggles Toward Finish Line Amid a
Chorus of Warnings,” CQWR, February 8, 2003, p.340.

129. Quoted in Keith Perine, “Presidents, Lawmakers Alike Caught Up In Cuba Embargo’s
Power to Polarize,” CQWR, May 18, 2002, p.1270.

130. “Remarks by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz at a Rally Held in General Antonio Maceo Square,
Santiago de Cuba, June 8, 2002”; “Key Address by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz, at a Massive
Demonstration Commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the Terrorist Act Against a Cubana
Jetliner off the Coast of Barbados, Revolution Square, October 6, 2001.”
http://espana.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/

131. “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the
Terrorist Attacks of September 11, September 20, 2001, Weekly Compilation of Presidential
Documents: Administration of George W. Bush, pp. 1347-1351; Commencement Address at
the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York June 1, 2002, Ibid., pp 944-948;
Bolton, “Beyond the Axis of Evil: Additional Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction”

132. Congressional Record, September 22, 1992, H9086.

133. Peter Tarnoff, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, “Strengthening Sanctions
Against Cuba,” Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Western Hemisphere
and Peace Corps Affairs Subcommittee, May 22, 1995 (transcript from Lexis-Nexis
Congressional Universe).

134. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, “Opening Remarks on Cuba at Press Briefing
followed by Question and Answer Session by other Administration Officials,” Office of the
Spokesman, Washington, D.C., March 20, 1998; “Statement on United States Policy Toward
Cuba, January 5, 1999,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Administration
of William J. Clinton, 1999, Volume 1. Washington, D.C., 1999, pp.7-8.

135. Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, Section 5(g), Public Law 102-484 (10/23/92).

136. Remarks at a Freedom House Breakfast October 6, 1995, Public Papers of the
Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1995, Volume 2. Washington, D.C.,
1995, pp.1544-1551.

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137. Remarks to the Cuban-American Community, June 27, 1995, Public Papers of the
Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1995, Volume 1. Washington, D.C.,
1996, pp.953-955.

138. Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, (Section 109a), Public Law 104-
114 (3/12/96).

139. U.S. Agency for International Development, Evaluation of the USAID Cuba Program,
http://www.usaid.gov/regions/lac/cu/program_report/. See especially the chapter, “Program
Evaluation and Compliance.” The recent budget data for the Cuba program is in U.S. Agency for
International Development, “Latin America and the Caribbean Overview: Cuba,” FY 2004
Congressional Budget Justification.
http://www.usaid.gov/policy/budget/cbj2004/latin_america_caribbean/cuba.pdf.

140. Fidel Castro Speaks at Moncada Ceremony, July 26, 1995, Foreign Broadcast
Information Service, Latin America Daily Report, 1995-145.

141. Raúl Castro, “The Political and Social Situation in Cuba and the Corresponding Tasks of
the Party,” Granma International (digital), March 27, 1996.

142. Quoted in Julio Garcia Luis, ed. Cuban Revolution Reader: A Documentary History.
Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press, 2001, pp.280-285.

143. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, “Statement on Cuba,” Office of the

Spokesman, Washington, D.C., January 5, 1999.

144. Ricardo Alarcón Quesada, “What They Have Done Is to Inform the World that the
Blockade Stays in Place, That They Will Try to Foster It, to Convince Others, to Make More
Propaganda, While They Continue on That Road Doomed to Failure,” Granma International
(digital), January 8, 1999.

145. Andres Oppenheimer, “Cuba: Back to Darkness,” Miami Herald , March 18, 1999 [OE].

146. See, for example, “Discursos pronunciados en el Acto Solemne, el 20 de junio del 2002
Intervención de Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, Presidente de la Asamblea Nacional del Poder
Popular,” 20 de junio del 2002.

147. “Information Offered to the People by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz,” Television and Radio
Appearance, June 13th 2002.

148. Quoted in Kevin Sullivan, “Anti-Castro Forces Mount Petition Drive,” Washington
Post, April 28, 2002 [OE].

149. Quoted in Kevin Sullivan, “In Havana, U.S. Radios Strike Note of Discord,”
Washington Post, May 5, 2002 [OE]; Fred Bernstein, “Lighting Matches In Cuba on the 4th,”
New York Times, July 4, 2002 [OE].

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150. Speech by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz at the Extraordinary Session of the National Assembly of
People’s Power, Havana International Conference Center, June 26, 2002.

151. Speech by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz on the current world crisis, on the occasion of his
inauguration as President of the Republic of Cuba. Havana, Cuba, March 6, 2003.

152. Press conference by Foreign Minister of the Republic of Cuba, Felipe Pérez Roque, on
the mercenaries at the service of the empire who stood trial on April 3, 4, 5 and 7, 2003, Havana,
April 9, 2003, Granma International (digital), April 2003; Tracey Eaton, “Cuban Spies Say
They Used Pro-Democracy Funds,” Dallas Morning News, May 18, 2003 [OE].

153. Karen DeYoung, “President Criticized Over Past Pledges About Cuba,” Washington
Post, May 21, 2003 [OE].

154. Quoted in David Gonzalez, “Cuban Crackdown on Critics Stalls a Drive to Ease U.S.
Embargo,” New York Times, April 13, 2003 [OE].

155. Daniel Schweimler, “Sugar and Tourism Force a Bitter Pill on Cubans,” Financial
Times (London), July 9, 2002 [OE]; Mary Jordan, “Ending an Era, Cuba Closes Sugar Mills,”
Washington Post, July 29, 2002 [OE].

156. Press conference by Foreign Minister of the Republic of Cuba, Felipe Pérez Roque on the
mercenaries at the service of the empire who stood trial on April 3, 4, 5 and 7, 2003.

157. Smith, The Closest of Enemies, pp. 263-264.

158. Quoted in Karen DeYoung, “Cuba Denounces Diplomats' Expulsions,” Washington

Post, May 15, 2003 [OE].

159. Special Presentation by Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz at the Televised Roundtable on “Recent
Events in the Country And the Increase of Aggressive Actions by the United States Government
Against the Cuban People,” April 25, 2003.

160. Paul Richter, “House Votes to Ease Travel to Cuba,” Los Angeles Times, September 10,
2003 [OE]

161. Edwin Chen, “Bush Steps Up Effort to Destabilize Castro's Regime,” Los Angeles
Times, October 11, 2003 [OE].

162. Kathryn A. Wolfe, “Mindful of Florida's Clout, Conferees Drop Cuba Travel From
Transportation Bill,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, November 15, 2003.

163. Christopher Marquis, “Bush's Allies Plan to Block Effort to Ease Ban on Cuban Travel,”
New York Times, November 13, 2003 [OE].

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