U.S. Has Post-Castro Era in Mind With Latest Steps

The Clinton administration said Tuesday that it expects time and mortality to accomplish what 40 years of U.S. policy have failed to do: end Fidel Castro’s iron grip on Cuba.

Explaining a series of steps intended to ease the plight of Cuban citizens while maintaining pressure on Castro’s government, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the objective is to “help the Cuban people prepare for the day when their country is once again free.”

James Dobbins, the National Security Council’s top Latin America expert, was even blunter: “There is a growing perception in this country, as well as in Cuba, that Cuba is approaching a transition. And as that transition approaches, people are more eager to find ways to assist it and to assure that it is peaceful and that it is democratic.”

Shorn of diplomatic euphemism, that means Washington now expects Castro, 72, to die sooner rather than later, and does not expect his Communist regime to survive him for long. The objective of the new steps is to extend a hand of goodwill to Cuba’s people and to try to get them ready to establish democracy.

Among the steps: The Baltimore Orioles--the only major league team to request permission to play the Cubans--could negotiate a home-and-home exhibition series with the Cuban national team this spring. Any U.S. resident could send up to $300 every three months to recipients in Cuba, a privilege previously extended only to residents with relatives on the island. Farmers and family restaurants could buy American food, seed, fertilizer and other agricultural products. Charter flights to Cuba could increase and move beyond the Miami-to-Havana corridor. And direct mail service to Cuba could begin.

“These steps are neither designed, nor expected, to alter our relations with the Cuban government,” Albright said. “But taken together, they constitute a major advance in our effort to reach out to the Cuban people.”

Administration officials hailed the steps as a significant advance. Some anti-Communist Cuban Americans condemned them as a backdoor attack on the overall U.S. embargo against Cuba. However, most nongovernment experts described them as modest.

“This is a very timid step,” said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank.

In taking the steps, President Clinton rejected a call by Sens. John W. Warner (R-Va.), Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and others for a bipartisan commission to conduct a top-to-bottom review of policy toward Cuba.

If administration officials had consulted Congress, said a spokesman for one of Castro’s most outspoken critics, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), “they would have found support for even bolder action.”

Most of the steps will require at least some cooperation from the Castro government. Cuban Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina said his country will take a wait-and-see attitude.

“The root of the problem is still a blockade that is unjust,” Robaina told Reuters in Haiti, a reference to the embargo against commerce that the administration pointedly did not lift.

The staunchly anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation in Miami blasted the proposal to sell food and agricultural supplies. Even if there were private businesses or individuals to buy American goods, the foundation said in a statement, such sales would be “morally unsustainable.” However, the foundation welcomed plans to leave most of the embargo in place.

Over the fervently anti-Castro Miami radio station Radio Mambi, commentators and callers denounced the easing of restrictions on money and food as a way of subverting the embargo. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said the measures were part of an administration attempt to mask its “true intention of normalizing relations with the Cuban dictator.”

Less hard-line members of the Cuban American community welcomed the steps.

“This is symbolically important because it shows some movement. It changes the tone,” said Damian Fernandez, a Cuba expert at Florida International University. “It shows that there is a slow withering away of the old-time policy of isolation, which is anachronistic.”

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Times staff writer Mike Clary in Miami contributed to this report.