WAYNE S. SMITH
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
November 3, 2003 Monday Home Edition
Coming as it did less than two weeks after President Bush had announced tougher measures against Cuba, including tightened travel controls, the Senate`s approval of an amendment to prohibit the use of Treasury funds to enforce those same controls can only be seen as a repudiation of President Bush`s policy.
The measure passed the Senate with a strong majority (59 to 36), with some 19 Republicans voting in favor. As the House had already passed the same amendment, the stage is set for a confrontation.
Republican leaders in the Congress can be expected to move heaven and earth to strip the amendment from the Treasury appropriations bill to which it is attached so that it will not reach the president`s desk.
But that will not be easy, for the language is the same in both House and Senate versions, so there is really no need to take it to committee. If the Republican leaders fail to get it out, the president will be faced with the choice of whether to veto. He has said that he will. But that decision could backfire.
The rejection of the president`s Cuba policy, especially as it relates to travel, should come as no surprise, for it has been clear for some months to those in the Congress who watch such things carefully that it lacks popular support.
Polls have consistently indicated that the majority of Americans favor lifting travel controls. Strong agricultural and business interests insist upon it, and upon opening up to further commercial contacts with Cuba. The president, in saying no, is pitting himself against some of the most powerful sectors in his own party.
Some speculate that the president must do this to assure votes in Florida. Really? Polls over the past year or more have indicated the great majority of Floridians are open to engagement with Cuba, and understand that it would economically benefit their state. Even the Cuban-American community has come around. Polls this year showed more than 55 percent of them believe the embargo had failed and that the United States should try a new policy. Certainly the majority of Cuban-Americans favor travel to the island.
Whose vote, then, is Bush after? Disturbingly, he seems to be appealing to a smaller and smaller minority of hard-line exiles. He invited only them, for example, to the Rose Garden gathering on Oct. 10 at which he announced the harsher measures. Not even members of the Cuban American National Foundation, once considered leaders of the hard-line approach to Cuba, were included; rather, the president invited members of the Cuban Liberty Council, which broke away from the foundation because, they said, it was too moderate. These are hardly allies who will help win over large numbers of votes.
Nor are the president`s reasons for tightening controls convincing.
"Tourism," he says, "perpetuates the misery of the Cuban people" because the money goes to the government and not the people.
But that is demonstrably false. First of all, much of the money does go directly to the people --- those who sell in the markets and who run private restaurants. And even much of what goes to the government ends up benefiting the people, for the government provides free health care, education and many other social services to all.
As a Cuban writer friend of mine put it, "The more money American visitors bring in, the better for the Cuban people."
There are no accurate polls on the subject available on the island, but I have been traveling there often for more than a quarter of a century and know literally hundreds of Cubans. I have never met one, including religious leaders and dissidents, in addition to average citizens, who did not want travel controls lifted and American citizens traveling freely to the island.
Finally, pointing up most dramatically perhaps the utter incongruity of the president`s position, he has called for the Department of Homeland Security to play a role in identifying and curbing those engaged in illegal travel to Cuba. Homeland Security doesn`t have enough to do in identifying and tracking terrorists? It must now also try to stop Americans from traveling to Cuba? Absurd. This is an issue on which the president seems simply to have lost his equilibrium.
Wayne S. Smith, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, was third secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Havana from 1958 to 1961.