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Friday, March 25, 2005

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  "We need to do what we did in Eastern Europe," by putting more Americans in contact with Cubans, said Rep. Wally Herger, of California, another free-trade Republican. "Change will not come from the (Cuba) policies we've had in the past."

Flake said this summer he will make his fourth attempt to get Congress to approve an amendment to a Treasury Department spending bill that would eliminate funding for enforcement of the U.S. travel ban against Cuba and thus allow Americans to travel to the island.

"When you run a play up the middle and it doesn't work, you don't run the same play 45 times," Flake said, applying an American football analogy to the United States' four-decade old policy of trying to isolate the Castro government with trade sanctions and other restrictions.

"Despite that Castro tries to sequester tourists, they get out" and among the Cuban people, Flake said. "They tip, they purchase, they have a corrosive effect on the regime."

Flake said he didn't sponsor the spending bill amendment in 2004 because it was a presidential election year, but did back a similar one in the three prior years. All three times it was eliminated from the bill in conference meetings before going before a full congressional vote.

Both lawmakers said they would also back other legislation aimed at making it easier for American food producers to sell to Cuba by easing new limitations on how communist Cuba pays for the goods.

Under a 2000 law that created an exception to the U.S. sanctions, American food and other agricultural products may be sold directly to the island on a cash-only basis. Cuba has contracted to buy about US$1.2 billion in American goods since the island began taking advantage of the law in late 2001.

In recent months, new interpretations of the law by President Bush's administration have tied up some sales by requiring that Cuba make the payments in full be before shipments leave American ports.

"Hopefully we can get this fixed," Flake said. "But make no mistake, the State Department is trying to make it more difficult to do these trades."

A Republican lawmaker from the farm state of Kansas, Rep. Jerry Moran, has introduced one of at least two pieces of legislation that would clarify those rules.

Moran, who sponsored the earlier law allowing the sales, visited Cuba separately this week to get a better sense of how recent moves concerning payments were affecting the trades.

During their trip, which was winding up Thursday, Flake and Herger met with Cuban officials including Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, parliament speaker Ricardo Alarcon, and representatives of Cuba's food import agency Alimport.

The lawmakers, who expressed a deep commitment to supporting the island's government opponents, also met with several dissidents, including democracy drive organizer Oswaldo Paya, key religious leaders, and the chief of the U.S. Interests Section, the American mission here.

Flake, who visited Cuba several times in the past, said he was surprised by a new optimism among communist officials about the island's future after increased trade agreements with Venezuela and China, as well as recent discoveries of petroleum deposits off the island's coast.

Despite predictions that the Castro government is nearing its end, "you certainly don't get that sense of urgency here," Flake said. "Things aren't near as bad as they were in 1992," he said, alluding to the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"I didn't realize how confident the government is about the next couple of years. It just confirms for me that we can't just sit around and wait for Fidel to die," Flake said of the 78-year-old Castro. "And we shouldn't."

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