Veterans Testify on Bill Allowing Trips to Vietnam

Civil liberties groups and Vietnam veterans seeking to return to the Southeast Asian country where they fought testified Tuesday for a bill sponsored by Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) that would lift U.S. restrictions on travel to Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia and Libya.

The measure’s proponents appeared at a packed hearing that represented a step forward in Berman’s three-year effort to make possible the free flow of individuals and information to a handful of countries against which the U.S. has imposed a total economic embargo.

“The amount of money spent by Americans abroad is negligible when compared with the cost exacted in curtailing basic rights that we as Americans take for granted,” said Jeanne M. Woods, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

“It is anomalous to stifle individual freedoms at home in the name of protecting democracy abroad.”

The measure faces stiff opposition from the Bush Administration.

Administration representatives told the House Foreign Affairs subcommittees on international economic policy and international operations that Berman’s bill would set back efforts to encourage democratic reforms by undermining the economic embargoes.

The bill “would permit the development of full-blown tourist industries, fed by U.S. dollars, to support some of the most repressive regimes in the world,” testified R. Richard Newcomb, director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Moreover, he said, Americans can visit the embargoed countries on their own as long as they make travel arrangements without using U.S. travel agents or tour groups.

Newcomb and other opponents of the bill focused on the potential impact on Cuba, where Fidel Castro seeks an influx of money to offset anticipated cuts in Soviet aid.

They said U.S. tourism would prop up an otherwise vulnerable regime.

Berman’s “Free Trade in Ideas” bill would remove the President’s authority to prevent travel by Americans to embargoed countries.

In return, it would give the Chief Executive more power to limit travel to places where citizens’ lives would be jeopardized.

A provision of Berman’s original 1987 measure was adopted in the 1988 Trade Act.

It rescinded a ban on importing and exporting films, newspapers and books to and from embargoed nations.

The current bill, however, faces formidable hurdles.

In addition to the Administration’s opposition, Rep. Dante B. Fascell (D-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is expected to be difficult to persuade to support the bill because he has many Cuban-Americans in his district.

Cuban American Foundation President Tony Costa testified against the measure Tuesday.

Berman, who initially sponsored the bill to promote civil liberties, said democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe in recent months have persuaded him that Americans permitted to travel to Cuba and the other embargoed countries would be catalysts for change.

The travel limit, he said, “only delays the spread of democratic ideas and institutions to closed societies.”

In a bid to highlight what he called “a particularly compelling case for the absurdity” of the travel limits, Berman held a news conference Tuesday with three leaders of Vietnam veterans groups, two of whom later testified.

Officials of the Vietnam Veterans of America, which has helped send 205 veterans back to Southeast Asia, face fines of up to $50,000 and prison terms of 10 years for sponsoring such trips.

Joseph La Fatch, 42, who fought in Vietnam as a 101st Airborne Division paratrooper, said he was a “cynical, isolated loner” before a 1988 return trip with 10 others.

There, he recalled, a battle-scarred, ex-North Vietnamese soldier told him “talk is better than hand grenades,” and La Fatch said he returned to America with “memories of the now-peaceful, seemingly timeless little country.”

“Twenty years ago our government sent these men to fight in Vietnam,” Berman said.

“Today, it denies them the emotional comfort to return to the battlefields where their friends and comrades died.”