Clinton Rejects Castro’s Call for Top-Level Talks

President Clinton rejected Cuban President Fidel Castro’s demand for high-level negotiations Thursday, brushing aside pleas from some of his political allies to begin talking to the Cuban leadership about ways to contain the growing refugee crisis in the Florida Straits.

Asked during a late afternoon session with reporters in the White House Rose Garden why the Administration negotiates with North Korea while refusing to talk to Castro, Clinton said that “we have a different policy of 30 years’ standing” that precludes direct contacts with Cuba.

The weather in Cuba and through the Straits turned nasty Thursday and is expected to become much more hazardous this weekend for the Cubans’ makeshift rafts. While the rain and high winds clearly discouraged refugees from beginning the difficult voyage, the rough conditions almost certainly will result in the deaths of some rafters already at sea.

News agency reports from Havana said that the beach at nearby Cojimar, the departure point for many of the thousands of refugees in the last week, was empty of rafters for the first time in days. Nevertheless, U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships continued to pick up Cubans who had departed earlier.

Coast Guard officials said that the weather was deteriorating rapidly in the Straits Thursday night, with squalls of between 20 knots and 40 knots and waves of between 6 and 10 feet--rough enough to swamp all rafts and many small boats being used by refugees.

Full-fledged storms are expected over the weekend.

“This is not a tropical storm,” said forecaster Lixion Avila of the National Hurricane Center. “But if you have rafters in this situation, it is very dangerous.”

Clinton said that he is ready to resume low-level talks on Cuban refugee status and immigration, which have been going on occasionally since 1984. But he ruled out discussing other subjects and said that he will not upgrade the negotiations by assigning senior officials to them.

He said that Castro “needs to be in consultation with his own folks. . . . The people of Cuba want democracy and free markets.”

“I would urge the American people to be firm and be calm about what is going on here now,” Clinton said. “We must not let any nation, even a nation as close to us as Cuba . . . control the immigration policy of the United States and violate the borders of the United States. We have to be firm in this and we will work this through to a successful conclusion.”

Earlier in the day, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff said that the Administration is determined not to give Castro the Washington-Havana dialogue he has long sought.

Both officials said that Castro deliberately caused the crisis by ending the island’s barriers to refugees in an effort to force a dialogue with the United States and it is up to him to end it. But that response ignores the immediate effect of the 3,000-a-day influx of refugees on the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard and the impact of the well-watched humanitarian disaster on the American public.

In a 2 1/2-hour late night speech Wednesday, Castro called for negotiations not only on immigration and refugee issues but also on the longstanding U.S. economic embargo and Washington’s control of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba under a lease that was signed long before Castro seized power.

“Solutions that are real, realistic and just would benefit the United States as well as us,” Castro said. In the same speech he said that his security forces would no longer interfere with Cubans trying to leave the island.

“We do not want to divert Castro’s attention from the real issue (of) internal reform,” Tarnoff told reporters at a White House briefing. “We don’t see any reason to try to divert the attention of the Cuban government or the Cuban people to the U.S.-Cuban relationship.”

Clinton’s refusal to talk with Castro continues a policy that was followed by eight previous presidents, starting with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Republicans generally praised the President for holding firm against negotiations, even though many of them were sharply critical of other elements of his policy. But a growing number of Democrats on Capitol Hill, joined by some outside experts, called for a new dialogue with Cuba.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that “some open negotiations with Castro make sense. It’s anachronistic not to do it.”

Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said: “Even those who remain determined to see Cuba’s political leadership change and its economy lose its Socialist moorings should ask themselves why the strategies of engagement, aid and encouragement which we are pursuing with former adversaries is inappropriate to our relations with Cuba.”

President-elect Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico also called for talks between Washington and Havana. He offered to mediate the dispute.

The Administration’s policy of refusing to deal directly with Cuba is far from unique. In recent years, Washington has also declined to talk with North Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Iran and the Palestine Liberation Organization, always with the objective of isolating and weakening a troublesome adversary.

Judged by the ultimate objective of dislodging the leadership of the target regime, the policy has been a failure. However, it may have contributed to concessions by North Korea, Vietnam and the PLO, which, in turn, led to dialogues with the United States.

However, non-government experts said they doubt that U.S. pressure will significantly weaken Castro’s hold on power.

“Certainly there is something to talk to the Cubans about,” said Peter Hakim, president of Inter-American Dialogue. “It seems silly just to throw mud at each other.

“Castro flourishes in periods of conflict,” he added. “It is in periods of detente that Castro has some problems.”

* VIOLENCE FEARED: Expanding Guantanamo refugee centers poses risks. A17