CUBA / THE CHILL DEEPENS : Castro Losing Last Support in Congress

Cuba’s Fidel Castro has lost his last friend in the U.S. Senate.

Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, after 30 years of advocating normal relations with Cuba and the lifting of the economic embargo imposed by President John F. Kennedy, has changed his mind.

Echoing a demand made by U.S. conservatives, Pell took the Senate floor last week to call on Castro to permit “free and fair elections under international supervision” and let the Cuban people decide their own future.

Pell not only ended his support for Castro; he also called for efforts to tighten economic sanctions against him.

“While almost the entire Communist world is changing and moving toward democracy, greater individual freedoms and more open and free market economies, Cuba is moving in an opposite direction,” the Rhode Island Democrat said.

Dissidents Arrested

Citing the arrest of a score of Cuban human rights advocates since March, he said Castro is converting his domain into the “Albania or the North Korea of the Caribbean.”

Pell had been the last senator with a liberal position on Cuba. An earlier ally, Sen. Lowell Weicker, a maverick Republican from Connecticut, lost his bid for reelection two years ago.

American liberals backed Castro’s revolutionary struggle in the 1950s, and many remained supportive after he won power in 1959 and embraced communism. Despite disapproval by both Democratic and Republican administrations, liberal members of Congress also showed sympathy for the Cuban regime, the only Marxist-Leninist government in the Western Hemisphere.

The high point of U.S.-Cuban relations came in 1977, when Castro and President Jimmy Carter partially restored official ties with the establishment of interest sections--quasi-diplomatic missions far below the embassy level--in each other’s capitals.

But the Mariel boatlift of 1980, in which Castro allowed felons and the mentally ill to join political refugees as 125,000 Cubans flooded into the United States, combined with renewed repression on the island to change the way many Americans looked at Cuba and its aging leader.

In the late ‘80s, Castro harshly rejected Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s socialist reforms, chilling relations with what had been Cuba’s most generous benefactor and aligning Castro with the world’s few remaining practitioners of true Marxist-Leninism.

Some might view Pell’s change of mind against a political background. After years of token opposition, he is facing a serious opponent in Rhode Island this November: Republican Rep. Claudine Schneider.

In the House, Rep. Dante B. Fascell (D-Fla.) took a firm anti-Castro line when he assumed the chairmanship of a largely liberal Foreign Affairs Committee in 1983, reflecting the strength of Cuban-American voters in his district.

Rep. Peter H. Kostmayer (D-Pa.), who once met with Castro and has favored easing U.S.-Cuban tension, reflected the changing mood of Congress in a recent interview.

“Castro sticks out like a sore thumb, and he focuses attention on Cuba and the bad human rights situation there,” Kostmayer said, explaining his support for a pending House resolution condemning Castro on the human rights issue.

Kostmayer is a candidate for the chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs, which will become vacant with the retirement this year of Rep. George W. Crockett Jr. (D-Mich.), an advocate of negotiation rather than force in dealing with Castro.

Pressure Needed

Kostmayer said he now believes in exerting pressure to promote change in Cuba, but he voiced doubt over a congressional effort to ban trading with Havana by U.S. subsidiaries in third countries.

“I doubt if it’s even legal outside of wartime,” Kostmayer said. “I think it’s a bad idea.”

The trade ban is set forth in an amendment , proposed by Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), to the 1990 Chemical Weapons Act, which is expected to go to conference this month.

The Bush Administration and other governments, among them Canada’s, have spoken out against the amendment. A similar law was removed from the books in the 1970s after Argentina threatened to nationalize a Ford plant unless Washington permitted Argentine-made Ford products to be exported to Cuba.