U.S. Offers Cuba Sweeter Deal on Refugee Crisis

The United States offered Cuba a sweeter deal Monday in an effort to resolve the diplomatic impasse over the outpouring of Cuban raft people that is embarrassing both Fidel Castro and President Clinton.

No details of the compromise proposal were released. But a U.S. official acknowledged that it involved an increase in the initial U.S. offer to grant more than 20,000 visas a year to Cuban emigrants in exchange for Castro’s pledge to keep his citizens from taking to the high seas illegally.

Michael Skol, deputy assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, handed over a document outlining the proposal in a meeting with Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly and a former foreign minister. The two met for a little more than an hour at the apartment building in downtown Manhattan that houses the Cuban mission to the United Nations. It was the fourth round in negotiations that began Thursday.

There was no report of Alarcon’s reaction. The two officials decided they would meet again today, accompanied by their full delegations. Alarcon is expected to give his reply to the U.S. offer then.

In Havana, Cuban Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina Gonzalez told reporters the talks were “stalled, with no positive signals to note.” But his assessment was made before the Labor Day negotiating session had ended in New York.

After receiving the original U.S. proposal to grant more than 20,000 visas a year to Cubans who want to emigrate to America, the Cubans countered with a demand for well over 100,000 visas, U.S. officials said. The figure was apparently designed to underscore what Castro regards as an American failure to live up to an earlier agreement to accept Cuban immigrants.

In 1984, the Ronald Reagan Administration signed an agreement that allowed the United States to process a maximum of 27,845 Cuban immigrant visas a year. In practice, America has admitted only 3,000 or so each year. Washington has maintained that the other applicants did not satisfy the requirements of U.S. immigration law.

The Cuban government insists that the United States reneged on the 1984 agreement and should admit all Cubans who applied but failed to receive visas since then. That presumably involves a total of well over 100,000.

The Cuban proposal evidently did not make it clear how soon Castro expected these emigrants to be accepted by the United States. A U.S. official said the timing was not even discussed with the Cubans, “given the magnitude of their proposal.” The number is simply too large for the Americans to accept, no matter what time frame was proposed, he said.

A U.S. official described Washington’s sweetened offer as “a responsible proposal to meet both sides’ objectives.” He said the Americans had worked hard and were trying to put the issue “on a different footing.”

He did not elaborate but noted that the U.S. negotiators are suggesting that the two sides regard the number of visas specified in the proposal as “a floor, not a ceiling.”

The official described the talks as caught “in a holding pattern,” pending a response from the Cubans to the latest U.S. offer.

In recent days, the Coast Guard has been plucking Cubans in rafts and makeshift boats out of the Florida Straits at an average of about 1,000 a day. While that is only about half the number of refugees who were taking to the seas a couple of weeks ago, it is still a considerable figure.

On Sunday, the Coast Guard picked up 1,179 Cuban refugees. By 2 p.m. EDT Monday, Coast Guard ships had picked up another 683.

Clinton, in an abrupt policy about-face, has ordered the Coast Guard to take intercepted refugees to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay on the southeastern tip of Cuba. The rafters are being detained there in tent camps that are adjacent to encampments of Haitian boat people. The Administration insists that neither the Cubans nor the Haitians will be allowed entry into the United States.

The U.S. military will soon use up all of the 20,000 spaces allotted for Cuban refugees at Guantanamo. It is building new camps to house 10,000 more Cubans at U.S. bases near the Panama Canal.

Haitian refugees at Guantanamo threw rocks at U.S. soldiers on Sunday to protest what they see as preferential treatment of the Cubans, the Associated Press reported. About 50 Haitians breached one of the camp fences when Panama announced it would accept up to 10,000 Cubans to ease the strain on the base, base spokesman Maj. Rick Thomas said Monday.

When a security force was called in, the Haitians began throwing rocks, Thomas said. A 16-year-old Haitian boy suffered a skull fracture when he was hit by a rock, and six Army soldiers also were injured. The boy was flown to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, according to wire service reports.

In a move that may ease the tensions, Surinamese and U.S. authorities said Monday that the first of 2,500 Haitian refugees granted asylum in Suriname would start arriving Friday, Reuters reported. U.S. military planes are expected to transport 250 refugees a day from Guantanamo to a newly built camp in the South American nation.

In Miami, police said they found two unexploded Molotov cocktails outside the offices of a Cuban American magazine in the Little Havana district. The two firebombs were removed early Sunday.