U.S., Cuba Still at Impasse as Talks Recess

American and Cuban negotiators recessed their talks Friday without reaching agreement on a formula to shut off the flood of Cuban rafters heading toward the United States on the high seas.

State Department spokesman David Johnson, who had been describing the talks as “serious and businesslike” for two days, added as the talks broke up that they had been “candid” on Friday as well. Diplomats, in their jargon, usually employ that word to connote argumentative discussion.

Johnson said that the talks at the offices of the Cuban Mission to the United Nations would resume at the U.S. mission Sunday afternoon. The talks began there Thursday morning.

The State Department spokesman said that the negotiations had reached the state where the main American proposal--a guarantee of more than 20,000 legal visas a year for Cuban emigrants--had been set down in writing for consideration by the Cuban delegation.

As Johnson put it, the Americans had presented their proposal for an “expanded, predictable, dependable, legal migration program from Cuba to the United States” in exchange for Cuban authorities taking action to prevent thousands of Cubans from setting off on their own without visas.

Even as the two delegations met, the Coast Guard continued to pick up Cuban refugees from the seas and take them to detention camps at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on the southeast Cuban coast. By late Friday, the Coast Guard had picked up 1,271 more Cuban refugees.

In various television interviews, Ricardo Alarcon, the former foreign minister who heads the Cuban delegation, has said that there is no point in dealing with the immigration issue without delving into what the Cuban government believes is the root cause--the American trade embargo against Cuba.

But Clinton Administration officials insist that they are interested only in focusing on the immigration problem. That stance has been repeated by Michael Skol, the deputy assistant secretary of state who heads the American delegation.

The Administration strategy, as outlined by senior officials, is to offer the Cubans little more than the guarantee of 20,000 visas.

The U.S. officials believe that Cuban President Fidel Castro is so embarrassed by the exodus of Cubans that he would accept the offer as a face-saving way to stop it. According to this view, Castro does not mind the Cubans leaving as much as he minds the woeful images that come with their flight on makeshift rafts.

But Castro also knows that the exodus has been deeply embarrassing to President Clinton. Clinton, facing a clamor in Florida against a new flood of immigrants, changed a 35-year-old policy last month and stopped granting automatic residence to Cuban refugees. Instead, they are being detained in Guantanamo alongside camps holding Haitian refugees.

It was clear that the two delegations, after presenting their positions Thursday, sat down Friday to detail the proposals in writing and argue about them. Johnson described the Friday talks as “serious discussions,” adding that “we gave each other concrete things to think about.”

American and Cuban diplomats signed an agreement more than 10 years ago that set aside a maximum of 27,875 visas a year for Cubans who qualified. But U.S. officials have insisted that most Cuban applicants do not meet the requirements of U.S. immigration law and visas have been granted to only about 3,000 Cubans a year.

The American offer presumably would relax immigration requirements so that more Cubans would qualify.

In the latest talks, the Americans said that they also were bringing up the repatriation of several thousand criminals who were freed from Cuban jails by Castro in 1980 so that they could come to the United States in the Mariel boat lift.

There have been reports, denied by Cuban officials, that the rafters include criminals as well. And, State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly told reporters in Washington that the Administration had received such assurances from the Havana government “in a way that had credibility.”

Scores of Cuban exiles crowded behind police lines near the Cuban mission Friday, shouting slogans at the mission and each other. One group of exiles shouted its approval of the Cuban embargo while a second group demanded its removal.

While the two groups were separated by police, an anti-Castro demonstrator managed to slip away and a scuffle broke out between him and a cluster of anti-embargo demonstrators. Police stopped the fight and arrested two of the exiles.