GOP Leaders OK Easing Ban on Cuba Trade

In a landmark move toward cracking the Cold War wall around Cuba, key House Republicans on Tuesday endorsed a measure that would allow direct sales of food and medicine to the island nation for the first time in four decades.

The compromise measure is expected to be approved by the House and Senate, perhaps before the end of the week.

The proposed policy change, which President Clinton supports in principle, would mark a turning point in diplomatic relations with a country the United States has sought to isolate since Fidel Castro established his Communist regime.

The new stance would mark a victory for those who have argued that economic sanctions are an ineffective foreign policy tool. It also would cap a years-long effort by U.S. agricultural interests to open up more foreign markets for their products.

“This is a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy and a new day for American agriculture,” said Rep. George R. Nethercutt Jr. (R-Wash.), chief sponsor of the measure to relax the U.S. embargo on Cuba and four other nations seen by the U.S. as pariahs.

The agreement, bitterly opposed by anti-Castro activists, also may be a sign of the Cuban American community’s waning influence as a result of its unpopular efforts to keep Elian Gonzalez in the United States. The 6-year-old Cuban castaway was rescued off the Florida coast Thanksgiving Day and could return to Cuba with his father as early as this afternoon after a highly politicized battle over his fate.

The measure’s immediate practical effect would be limited by two concessions won by the anti-Castro forces. Sales to Cuba would be restricted to cash-only transactions, with the U.S. government and American businesses barred from extending credit. And a ban on imports of Cuban goods to the U.S. would continue.

Embargo supporters hope these restrictions would make it as difficult as possible for cash-strapped Cuba to purchase U.S. goods.

These restrictions would not apply to the other countries for which the embargo on food and medicine sales would be lifted: Iran, Libya, North Korea and Sudan.

Clinton has supported the concept of such sales to Cuba. But the White House expressed reservations about provisions of the Nethercutt proposal that would require a president in most cases to get congressional approval before imposing a unilateral embargo.

White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart withheld judgment on the proposal until the Clinton administration sees the final details in legislative form.

“We are not opposed to allowing things like food and medicine to go to Cuba,” he said, “as long as it benefits the people and not the Castro government.”

Trade advocates said they are not worried that Clinton’s concerns would kill the measure--especially if, as expected, it is buried in a larger bill that funds various government programs and agencies.

“I can’t imagine the president would veto the bill over that issue,” Nethercutt said.

Although attention has focused on Cuba, the Nethercutt proposal also drew fire from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which opposed lifting the sanctions against Iran.

The agreement announced Tuesday represented a setback for House Republican leaders, who vehemently opposed any change in trade policy toward Castro’s regime but who conceded they no longer had the votes to prevail.

“You cannot thwart the will of the House,” said Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas). “Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug. In this case I’m the bug.”

In the Senate, which in the past has voted to relax the embargo, even GOP leaders who want to keep current policy seemed resigned to accepting the compromise.

“I don’t like it at all,” said Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). “But I’m a realist. . . . At this point I’m willing to accept the will of the Congress, if that’s what it is.”

John Kavulich, president of the nonprofit U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, estimated that Cuba would buy up to $45 million in U.S. farm goods in the first year of a relaxed embargo, a relatively meager amount. But he predicted that figure would grow.

“Short-term, this is symbolic,” Kavulich said. “Medium- to long-term, it can provide some substantive opportunity.”

A trade embargo against Cuba has been in place since 1960, shortly after Castro came to power. Although some food and medicine sales were allowed periodically under government-supervised conditions, the embargo was significantly tightened in 1992 and again in 1996, reducing such trade to a bare minimum.

For years, the sanctions policy was largely unquestioned by members of both parties. It reflected a consensus that economic sanctions put pressure on Castro to reform Cuba’s economic and political system, and that his government should be denied any benefits of U.S. trade until he did so.

The embargo remained in place even as the Cold War ended and the U.S. opened trade and diplomatic relations with many other hostile regimes. Last month, for instance, the House approved the establishment of permanent normal trade relations with China--the largest Communist nation in the world. The Senate is expected to follow suit soon.

A growing number of critics have attacked the Cuba embargo as an anachronistic policy that has failed to bring about meaningful reform. The critics also have argued on humanitarian grounds that food and medicine should not be used as weapons of foreign policy.

Sentiment for relaxing the embargo to allow at least food sales began escalating dramatically as major portions of the U.S. farm economy experienced plummeting commodity prices in recent years. In response, the farm lobby and its allies in Congress mounted an increasingly aggressive campaign to ease the embargo.

That drive scored its first big victory last year, when the Senate voted overwhelmingly to relax the embargo. But the proposal went nowhere in the House.

This year, Nethercutt persuaded the House Appropriations Committee to include in an agricultural appropriations bill his amendment to allow food and medicine sales to Cuba and the four other sanctioned nations. He won the fight in committee despite concerted opposition from House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who rarely loses such battles.

Since then, DeLay and other GOP leaders have spent weeks trying to find a way to defeat Nethercutt’s effort.

The issue opened a politically sensitive division among Republicans. Nethercutt, who faces a tough reelection fight in his agriculture-dependent district, is one of several GOP incumbents from farm states whose political fortunes could be boosted by relaxing the trade embargo. But doing so probably would hurt Republicans among Cuban Americans, a constituency that generally supports GOP candidates.

Some analysts said the success of the Nethercutt proposal shows that controversy over the Elian Gonzalez case has undercut the influence in Washington of the Cuban American community.

“What the Elian case has done is to unquestionably undermine the hold that the Cuban American lobbyists have had on Congress,” said Mark Falcoff, Latin America specialist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “If the legislation [easing economic sanctions] were to go through, I suppose it should be called the Elian Act.”

Rather than fight it out on the House floor, GOP leaders last week ordered the two sides to negotiate a middle ground that would allow everyone to claim some victory. The result was Tuesday’s compromise, finalized at a meeting that lasted until 2 a.m.

Anti-Cuba activists fought hard for assurances that Cuba would not be able to buy food or medicine on credit provided by the U.S. government or American commercial interests. Nethercutt conceded that will make it harder for U.S. farmers to penetrate the Cuban market.

However, the compromise does not prohibit Cuba from going to financiers in other countries to help raise money to pay for U.S. goods.

Another provision won by the anti-Castro lawmakers would write into law the administrative ban on U.S. tourism to Cuba, which now can be waived at the discretion of the president.

GOP congressional leaders have not yet decided exactly how they would send the embargo measure to the White House, but they were planning procedures that would slip it into a must-pass spending bill--either for military construction or agriculture. That would mean the compromise would not go before the House or Senate to be voted on separately.

Times staff writers Esther Schrader and Nick Anderson contributed to this report.