10 September 2003
Administration Decries House Move to Ease Cuba Trade Embargo
State Dept. reiterates opposition to lifting 40-year-old embargo
By Eric Green
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- The Bush administration has reiterated its opposition to any lifting of the four-decade-old U.S. trade embargo on Cuba.
In decrying a September 9 vote by the U.S. House of Representatives to ease the embargo, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that such action, if enacted into law, would provide "material benefit to a regime which only six months ago undertook the most significant act of political repression in the Americas in a decade." Thus, lifting the embargo "strikes us as deeply unwise," Boucher said September 10.
Boucher was referring to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's crackdown on dissidents earlier in 2003, in which more than 75 people were jailed. Castro's crackdown received world-wide condemnation.
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan also said September 10 that President Bush's position on keeping the embargo in place "remains unchanged." Bush is "strongly committed" to the embargo on Cuba, until Cuba allows freedom of elections and speech, and releases all political prisoners, said McClellan.
Despite Cuba's crackdown on dissidents, House lawmakers approved three amendments to ease the U.S. embargo on Cuba. One vote was to withhold funding to enforce a U.S. travel ban on Cuba, another to relax restrictions on remittances that Cubans in the United States send to their relatives back home, while a third vote would prevent the Bush administration from restricting "people-to-people" travel exchanges to the Caribbean island nation.
A similar vote on the measures may come up in the U.S. Senate. But Bush has promised to veto any bill that eases the embargo.
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said in a "Statement of Administration Policy" September 4 that "it is essential to maintain sanctions and travel restrictions to deny economic resources to the brutal Castro regime."
OMB said that "lifting the sanctions now, or limiting our ability to enforce them, would provide a helping hand to a desperate and repressive regime at the expense of the Cuban people. If the final version of the [congressional] bill contained such a provision, the president's senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill."
In the September 9 debate on the House floor on whether to ease the embargo, Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (Republican of Florida) said that Bush's threat to veto such a bill "guarantees" that the embargo will stand.
But Rep. Jeff Flake (Republican of Arizona), who sponsored the amendment that would lift the travel ban, said the freedom of citizens to travel was an "important American right," adding: "All we're doing now is curtailing the freedoms of our own citizens. American travelers are the best ambassadors of American values."
Rep. Rose DeLauro (Democrat of Connecticut) argued that current U.S. policy toward Cuba "hurts the 11 million innocent Cuban men, women, and children who could benefit from our travel, our new ideas, [and] our steadfast belief in democratic ideals, freedoms, and way of life. We will not advance rights to the Cuban people by embracing a policy of isolation that has failed for 40 years."
DeLauro called the travel ban "an archaic part" of an "archaic U.S. foreign policy on Cuba."
However, House Majority Leader Tom Delay (Republican of Texas) said that if the House action became law, it would reward Castro and his "thugocracy."
Rep. Robert Menendez (Democrat of New Jersey) said that a vote to ease the sanctions "flies in the face of all of those who languish inside of Cuba who risked their liberty and their lives to make change within their country."
Voting to ease the sanctions, he said, "is a vote to fund the Cuban economy and Cuban tyranny."
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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