Castro Lifts Key Obstacle in U.S. Talks : Migration: Cuba will resume N.Y. meetings on the exodus today without pressing the trade embargo issue. But Havana’s envoy still sees a ‘long road’ ahead before any accord.

Cuban President Fidel Castro will no longer insist on discussing the U.S. trade embargo of his nation as a condition for settling the immigration dispute that has been fueled by the exodus of thousands of refugees from the island, Havana’s chief negotiator said Saturday.

At the same time, two leading members of Congress urged the Clinton Administration to consider lifting the decades-old embargo and broaden talks with Castro.

The negotiator, Ricardo Alarcon, said that despite his country’s concession on the embargo, he and U.S. diplomats still have a “long road” to travel before reaching a detailed agreement to end the flow of Cuban rafters who have been trying to reach the United States through the Florida Straits.

Alarcon, a former foreign minister and U.N. ambassador, is scheduled to resume talks with U.S. negotiators today at the American mission to the United Nations in New York. The discussions, which began Thursday, were suspended for a day when no agreement was reached by Friday night.

The talks are proceeding at a relatively slow pace despite the sense of urgency felt by the Clinton Administration over the Cuban immigration issue.

The steady flow of refugees is troublesome for President Clinton, who also faces a difficult situation elsewhere in the Caribbean--the continued defiance by Haiti’s military commander Gen. Raoul Cedras.

Last week, U.S. State Department officials seemed to raise the ante in the region by advertising their determination to invade Haiti, if need be, to restore to power elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was overthrown in a military coup.

The dual issues loom large over the White House, which has been sorely criticized for its handling of an array of foreign policy matters.

Alarcon, speaking on CNN’s “Newsmaker Saturday,” said that because the Americans refuse to discuss the embargo, “we are flexible enough to sit down with them and make an effort to try to resolve a partial issue.”

Asked whether U.S. negotiators had given any indication of a willingness to discuss the longstanding embargo, Alarcon said: “No, and I think it’s a mistake. It’s something that has to be done one day.”

While Alarcon declined to discuss any details of the negotiations, he acknowledged that the Americans had offered to guarantee more than 20,000 immigrant visas a year to Cubans if Castro can stop the exodus.

U.S. and Cuban diplomats signed an agreement more than 10 years ago that set aside a maximum of 27,845 visas a year for qualified Cubans. 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 new U.S. offer would presumably relax the immigration requirements.

The two sides also have discussed the return of about 1,500 convicts who arrived in the 1980 Mariel boat lift and are now in U.S. jails.

In exchange for the U.S. concessions, Washington hopes Castro will use his police force to stop the refugee flow.

The exodus reflects the sore economic straits of Cuba these days, abandoned by its old patron, the former Soviet Union, and cramped by the trade embargo. The 32-year-old embargo was imposed by the John F. Kennedy Administration in February, 1962, after the now-infamous Bay of Pigs invasion failed and Castro announced that he was a communist.

Occasional efforts by Castro to get the embargo lifted have failed.

Recently, after several incidents in which Cubans hijacked ferries and other boats to make the trip to Florida, Castro decided to let Cubans go unimpeded as long as they did not seize government boats to make the trip.

The refugee flow appeared to lessen Saturday. While the U.S. Coast Guard said that it had intercepted 1,353 Cuban refugees by day’s end Friday, it reported only 850 rescues on Saturday. More than 20,000 Cubans have been intercepted since the exodus began in earnest last month.

Hoping to discourage the departure of refugees, Clinton has revoked the right of Cubans to enter the United States automatically as political refugees and has ordered the Coast Guard to take them to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay on the eastern tip of Cuba.

He has ordered the Cubans detained in camps there, not far from Haitian refugees who also had fled their homeland in hopes of entering the United States.

The Administration’s policies toward both Haiti and Cuba were sharply criticized Saturday by Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Contending that Castro is, in effect, “dictating” U.S. policy, Hamilton said on CNN: “I find that to be a very unacceptable situation. So far as I can see, our policy is to kind of sit back and wait to see what Castro does, hoping that he will pass from the scene in some way. It’s a reactive policy and not satisfactory.”

Hamilton said he would lift the embargo “in a calibrated way” and use it “as a leverage, as a tool. . . .” Rather than isolating Cuba, he said, the United States “ought to be . . . invading Cuba, if you would, with information, with people, with facts.”

Lugar agreed, saying: “I would, if I were President Clinton, go on with that (talking about the embargo) fairly soon. All these stout denials that we will never talk . . . seem to me just simply to create a very, very tough situation.”

Lugar also derided indications by Deputy Secretary of Defense John M. Deutch that a Haitian invasion was a virtual certainty.

Meanwhile Saturday, the Defense Department announced that Defense Secretary William J. Perry canceled a trip to Russia so he could remain in Washington to “deal with ongoing issues, particularly Haiti and Cuba.”

* PREPARING IN PANAMA: Cuban transfers to Panama promise to be complicated. A17