Enemies Aid Castro Yet Again

God must love Fidel Castro; why else does he make Castro’s enemies so stupid? Last week, Castro made world headlines again: visiting the pope at the Vatican, and isolating the United States at the United Nations, where only Uzbekistan and Israel joined Uncle Sam in supporting the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

Ever since the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro’s bitterest enemies have made him look good. Now with the Cuban economy still in deep trouble and Castro facing international isolation, his enemies have done it again. This time, it’s the Helms-Burton law that has embroiled the United States in a no-win battle with its closest allies, and put Castro back on the world’s center stage.

Helms-Burton was written the way a kid writes a letter to Santa: Anti-Castro Cuban Americans made a list of everything they could think of, hoping to get at least part of what they asked for. The bill was so extreme it had little chance of passage--until Congress and the president lost their heads after Cuba shot down two planes from Brothers to the Rescue. Before anybody thought about what they were doing, the whole crazy list whooped through Congress into law.

This turns out to have been a bad move.

Washington woke up to discover that Helms-Burton attempts to universalize the U.S. embargo against Cuba by subjecting foreign companies who use properties confiscated by the Cuban revolution to lawsuits and other penalties under U.S. law. Since virtually every piece of property in Cuba might come under this law, the Cuban Americans who put the bill together hoped to force foreign companies into observing the U.S. embargo.

While President Bill Clinton, in a rare moment of something faintly resembling political courage, suspended the provision in the law allowing U.S. residents to file lawsuits against foreign companies, other provisions of Helms-Burton have gone into effect--including the requirements that the U.S. State Department ban the directors and officials of certain foreign companies with investments in Cuba from entering the United States.

It is just possible the rest of the world might have let Washington get away with this foolishness; the United States has a worldwide reputation for eccentricity, even hysteria, where Latin America and the Caribbean are concerned.

Unfortunately for everyone but Castro, that widely respected statesman and scholar-diplomat from New York, Republican Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato, thought it was a good time to pander to yet another lobby, and pushed measures through Congress imposing sanctions on foreign countries who fail to observe U.S. sanctions against Libya and Iran. Once again, an opportunistic president signed these foolish measures into law, and suddenly the United States had a messy crisis on its hands.

Cuba might be Uncle Sam’s obsession, but adding Libya and Iran to the list forced Europe to take notice. With United States asserting unilateral power to enforce its laws on companies in foreign countries, foreign governments have no choice but to react. France may not care much about Cuba, but Libya is far closer to France than it is to the United States, and the future of North Africa is France’s No. 1 policy nightmare. France simply cannot permit its North-African policy to be dictated by Washington.

France isn’t alone. No self-respecting country can allow the U.S. Congress to tell it who it can trade with. Congressional posturing and presidential cowardice have put the United States in a position that forces other nations to oppose our foreign policy.

Although the European Union is more concerned about the U.S. laws on Libya and Iran, Castro makes a better poster child than Moammar Kadafi, so the EU is concentrating its fire on Helms-Burton. Together with our North American Free Trade Agreement partners, Canada and Mexico, the EU has developed laws that would allow any foreign company sued in the United States under Helms-Burton to countersue and recover its damages abroad.

That’s only the beginning. Last week, the European Union demanded, and the World Trade Organization agreed, to set up a panel to see if Helms-Burton violates the rules of the WTO. Under WTO rules, the United States has an extremely weak case. The only way to avoid WTO condemnation and the assessment of trade penalties against the United States is for Washington to plead “national security”--claiming that Cuba poses such a threat to U.S. security that the special rules are justified.

This gets the United States off the hook in the WTO, but it sets a bad precedent. If everybody pleads national security when attacked in the WTO, then the WTO will be fatally weakened, and the United States will lose the ability to challenge unfair-trade procedures by countries like China and Japan.

This isn’t the end of the problem. The legal theory of Helms-Burton--that a company from one country operating legally in a second country can be hauled into a third-country court--wreaks havoc with the concept of international commercial law. Using Helms-Burton as a precedent, an Arab country could allow Palestinians to sue U.S. companies for using property allegedly confiscated from Palestinians by Israel. Germany could pass a law allowing Chechans to sue Finnish companies operating in Russia.

Helms-Burton, in other words, turns the international legal system into an anarchic mess. U.S. companies, who lead the world in multinational operations, have the most to lose from this development. Will Coca-Cola get sued every time the Jesse Helmses and the D’Amatos of the Third World decide to pander to their constituents?

The Clinton administration, which clearly had no idea of the slippery slope ahead when it merrily signed these silly bills, is now floundering in an attempt to get out of this mess. U.S. diplomats, virtually all of whom think the laws are outrageous, are being harassed and embarrassed at international conferences. Their jobs force them to defend U.S. policy, but when foreign diplomats upbraid them, they have nothing intelligent to say in reply.

Special envoy Stuart E. Eizenstat has been on a damage-control mission to the NAFTA and EU countries. He is begging the Europeans to save Washington’s face with some cosmetic condemnations of Cuban human-rights violations, but the Europeans insist, so far, on the repeal of the offending laws.

The administration’s position is getting more difficult all the time. Asking the GOP majorities in Congress to repeal or substantially amend the laws on Cuba, Libya and Iran would be politically expensive. “Soft on Castro” might be a label Clinton could live with, now that the election is behind him and Florida’s electoral votes are safely in his column; but “soft on Libya” and “soft on Iran” are harder to bear. And with the triumphant and vindictive Sen. Helms (R-N.C.) still firmly in charge of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee--and with only 40 filibustering senators needed to block repeal--it is not clear that Clinton could roll these laws back if he tried.

Meanwhile, however, as the business community wakes up to the danger of the Helms-Burton precedent, and as the EU steps up the heat in every international forum, the administration’s discomfiture becomes worse all the time.

The only person having any fun is Castro--who also had the happiness last week of hearing Pope John Paul II, the world’s most famous anti-communist, branding the U.S. embargo of Cuba an immoral mistake.

Small wonder that Castro has been telling foreign visitors of his deep interest in religion.