Carter Hopes His Cuba Visit Fosters Ties

Calling for closer ties between the U.S. and Cuba in everything from policing bio-terrorism to curing AIDS, former President Carter ended a five-day visit here Friday saying he will brief the White House before President Bush delivers a major Cuban policy address Monday.

After an exhausting visit that included hours of talks with President Fidel Castro, visits to biotech research centers and food markets, a live televised address to the Cuban people and detailed discussions with dissidents, Carter expressed hope that he had sowed some seeds for change.

“After 43 years of misunderstanding and animosity, I realize one brief visit cannot change the basic relations between our people,” Carter told reporters shortly before leaving Havana. “But our hope is that in some small way our visit will improve that situation.”

Carter aide Robert A. Pastor said, “I think President Carter injected a very powerful idea into two body politics.... No one any longer can ignore the power of the idea that there is an alternative to trading insults.”

As a first step, Carter said he will fax recommendations to Bush today. The president, who rejected Carter’s appeal this week to lift the four-decade embargo on the island, is expected to announce an even tougher line toward this Communist-run nation next week while campaigning in Florida for his brother. Republican Gov. Jeb Bush is up for reelection, and Florida has a strong voting bloc of Cuban Americans, many of whom oppose Castro’s regime.

Another Carter initiative outlined here Friday by his aides takes a far longer view. The delegation turned over to the Cubans a foot-thick volume of newly declassified documents covering secret U.S. negotiations with the Castro government during Carter’s 1977-81 presidential term. The talks, aimed at restoring normal relations between the two countries, ultimately failed.

Pastor, who served as national security advisor on Latin America during Carter’s term, said the delegation requested similar documents this week from the Cubans. He said he hopes both governments can study them and learn lessons “that may be of use if we decide to try it again.”

Carter indicated that jump-starting such an effort was not among his mission’s objectives, which he described as holding extensive conversations with Castro, government officials, dissidents and other Cubans and then sharing what he learned with the White House, the State Department and Congress.

While renewing his appeal to end the embargo, which he called “an imposition on the human rights of American citizens” because it denies them free travel to and trade with Cuba, Carter also used his news conference Friday to share some of the messages he’ll deliver to Washington.

Carter quoted the approximately two dozen Cuban dissidents--many of them former political prisoners--he met with privately Thursday as strongly urging the Bush administration not to fund their pro-democracy projects and causes. To do so, they said, would be undermine their struggle for the very ideals of freedom Bush says he hopes to promote in Cuba.

The Cuban government casts the dissidents as paid American agents and calls the ambitious Varela Project an American import. The project’s leaders spent a year gathering 11,020 signatures on petitions calling for a referendum on greater freedom. They delivered the petitions to Cuba’s National Assembly last week.

Carter, who defended the Varela Project during his television address as a home-grown Cuban effort, noted that tens of millions of people here learned of the effort from his speech.

The former president praised Castro for allowing him to speak uncensored to the Cuban people and for publishing a verbatim transcript of the address in Granma, the Communist Party’s daily newspaper.

But Carter stopped short of predicting that the airing either augured a new opening by the regime or might lead to a backlash of repression after he leaves.

“What the effect will be, I have no way to ascertain,” Carter said. “It’s too early to assess the final reaction of the Cuban government to this unprecedented ability to exchange ideas.”

Carter said he had “long discussions” with Castro about the Varela Project and believes that Cuba has yet to decide how to deal with the dissident effort.

On the bio-terrorism issue that had opened his visit and sent the biggest ripples back to Washington, Carter acknowledged that Cuba’s technology could be used to manufacture and wage germ warfare and that Havana had shared that technology with about two dozen nations.

He had caused controversy Monday when he raised doubts about the contention of U.S. administration conservatives that Cuba was exporting technology that could be used to make biological weapons, saying the White House, State Department and intelligence officials who briefed him for the trip never raised such allegations.

On Friday, Carter encouraged the Bush administration and Castro’s government to reach agreements permitting the joint monitoring of any such projects and manufacturing plants abroad in which Cuba played a role.

Finally, when asked whether he feared that Castro had gained more than he had from the trip, the former president flashed a trademark grin and said: “No. I don’t have any fear of about whether President Castro looks better after my visit or whether I look better.”

That is not, he added, why he came.