Clinton Backs Bill to Ease Cuba Embargo

The Clinton administration, treading gently to overcome strong opposition from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), is working behind the scenes to marshal support for bipartisan legislation to exempt food and medicine from the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.

Clinton has disclosed that he favors the bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and John W. Warner (R-Va.). But the president is concerned about whether the bill’s supporters can “get around” the opposition of Helms, an adamant foe of the measure who has criticized Clinton for acting “alone” in recently issuing an executive order that eased curbs on sending medicine and money to Cuba.

Support for exempting food and medicine from the embargo has been growing in both the Senate, where 25 members--including six Republicans--have signed the Dodd-Warner bill, and in the House, where another version of the legislation has been signed by 115 members, including seven Republicans.

Dodd said he was pleased to learn that Clinton had expressed support for the bill, which would represent a significant expansion of his executive order. Key Democratic aides in the Senate and House expressed optimism that Congress will pass the measure.

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The United States has maintained a trade embargo against Cuba since the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, but support for it has ebbed as Cuban President Fidel Castro has grown older and most of the world’s other Communist countries have turned to democracy.

Clinton announced the measures easing some sanctions in March, after Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Cuba. The measures--aimed at improving conditions for individual Cubans in the hopes that support for Castro would decline in the process--streamlined procedures for sending medical supplies to Cuba, authorized direct humanitarian flights from the United States to the island and legalized limited remittances from Cuban Americans to relatives there.

Dodd and Warner, in a letter to colleagues urging support for their bill, wrote of the “harmful impact of the current policy on the health of the Cuban people--particularly with respect to the health of children, the elderly and the infirm.” The letter added: “We can no longer turn our backs on the suffering of innocent people less than 100 miles from our border.”

Clinton expressed his support for the embargo legislation in a recent conversation with Peter Bourne, chairman of the American Assn. for World Health.

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Momentum for eliminating food and medicine from the embargo has been building since early last year, when Bourne’s organization released results of a yearlong study by medical experts that showed lack of food and medicine has caused suffering and deaths among Cubans.

Talking with the president at a book party in Washington that was also attended by a Times reporter, Bourne asked if Clinton supported the Senate bill. Clinton said, “I do, but I just hope we can get around Jesse Helms’ opposition.”

Bourne, an aide to former President Carter, suggested that Clinton send a positive signal on the matter to Congress. The president didn’t reply directly but pointed to his recent executive order easing some of the sanctions.

At the White House, Press Secretary Mike McCurry expressed surprise that Clinton had disclosed his support for the Senate bill. But he confirmed that the administration is “trying to find bipartisan consensus” on lifting the food and medicine embargo. “We’re trying to thread the needle and get everyone together on this issue,” McCurry said, adding that, as a result of Clinton’s executive order, “medicine for all practical purposes already is exempted.”

Clinton’s expression of support for the trade embargo bill also surprised Helms’ office. Mark Thiessen, the senator’s foreign policy spokesman, said: “Our understanding. . . . was that the administration intended to work with us to get humanitarian relief to the Cuban people. Trying an end run would be extremely unconstructive.”

Thiessen was referring to Helms’ endorsement--after the pope’s visit to Cuba--of a Cuban exile group’s proposal to expand donations of humanitarian aid to the island nation. Under the proposal, which Helms plans to introduce in a bill soon, direct U.S. government emergency aid of food and medicine would be distributed by the American Red Cross.

Helms recently made clear that, despite the pope’s appeal for ending the food and medicine embargo, he would oppose such efforts. He was co-author of a 1996 bill that toughened the embargo. Clinton at first opposed that measure but signed it in 1996 under political pressure after Cuban jet fighters shot down two unarmed small planes operated by a Miami-based Cuban exile group, killing four people.

Dodd sees little room for compromise with Helms and said that, because Cuban officials do not let the Red Cross operate in Cuba, Helms’ plan for expanded humanitarian aid won’t work.