The Washington Post. June 30, 2000
House Approves Spending Package
By Eric Pianin. Washington Post Staff Writer. Friday, June 30, 2000; Page A04
The House gave final approval last night to an $11.2 billion emergency spending package after Democratic senators forced GOP leaders to abandon plans to include compromise language easing economic sanctions against Cuba.
Congress has spent the better part of four months dickering over funds requested by the White House for troops in Kosovo, anti-drug efforts in Colombia and disaster relief. The House adopted the package, 306 to 110, and the Senate was expected to approve it today.
The final package includes $1.3 billion earmarked for Colombia and other Andean countries for their war on drugs and $6.4 billion for the military, including $2 billion to replenish operating funds used for Kosovo. There is also $361 million for relief from Hurricane Floyd and other disasters,
$661 million for the damage a New Mexico forest fire caused to homes and the national laboratory at Los Alamos, $600 million for low-income heating assistance and $700 million for the Coast Guard.
While approval of the emergency funding was assured late yesterday afternoon, after final talks between House and Senate leaders, Republicans will have to find another legislative vehicle for the Cuban sanctions agreement after they return from the Fourth of July recess.
The compromise plan for easing economic sanctions against Cuba that House Republicans worked out earlier this week was dropped from the package after Senate Democrats critical of the plan threatened a filibuster.
The dispute pitted Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) against House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who helped negotiate the compromise for allowing the sale of food and medicine to Cuba for the first time in nearly 40 years.
Dodd and Dorgan contend the terms of the agreement are too restrictive--denying Cuba access to U.S. credit or private loans--and would do little to open Cuba to U.S. grain sales. Dodd also strongly objects to a provision that turns current restrictions on travel to Cuba into law.
"The agreement is a political fig leaf that's not going to result in our ability to sell food to Cuba," Dorgan said. "And it's a step backwards in terms of travel."
Hastert vowed to retain the Cuba language but backed off after Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) advised him there was no way they could get around the filibuster until after the recess.
Dodd's state has an economic stake in the bill's passage because the measure would provide $234 million to purchase 18 Blackhawk helicopters to be used by Colombia's army and national police in their drug interdiction campaign. The Blackhawks are manufactured by United Technologies Corp. of
Hartford, Conn.
Meanwhile, environmentalists and Clinton officials complained about the Republicans' decision to insert language at the last minute to block the Environmental Protection Agency from implementing rules aimed at cleaning up the nation's waterways.
Cuba Triumphant Over Elian
By Karen DeYoung. Washington Post Staff Writer. Friday, June 30, 2000; Page A01
HAVANA, June 29 –– With Elian Gonzalez back home at last, the Cuban government is riding high.
As President Fidel Castro's government sees things, the 6-year-old boy's return Wednesday night signified not only a defeat for Cuba's archenemies in Miami--the Cuban American activists who tried to keep him--but also a triumph for the Communist leadership that has reignited political ardor
among Cubans grown tired of deprivation and isolation.
"The Elian case gave us the momentum to revitalize a process," said National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, Castro's point man on Elian for the last seven months. "Young people were involved for the first time, and a new generation" took to the streets to support
government policy on getting the young boy home.
Although Castro's government exhorted the Cuban people Wednesday to temper celebrations of the boy's return to his home and family, Alarcon expressed delight at what he portrayed as a government triumph here and abroad and acknowledged that the government had used the issue to rally popular
support.
"It's true to say that the leadership used it . . . to unify" the populace in a national cause, a clearly elated Alarcon said in a lengthy interview today.
Although a number of outsiders here acknowledged that strong popular feeling against Elian's Miami "kidnapping" may have been genuinely felt, several expressed doubt about its lasting significance.
"I've seen many exercises in schooling and drilling the masses," said a Western diplomat of long experience here. "In and of itself," the government's organization of mass protest marches over Elian "was nothing new," he said, but Cuba's obvious satisfaction today "reflects
the correct assessment of Castro from the start that it was a win-win situation."
"If Elian stayed, they could damn the U.S. forever," he explained. "If he came back, they could claim victory."
Most of the Elian posters, ubiquitous in Havana, have already been taken down. In comments to strangers on the street, a number of Cubans declined to draw any larger significance from the case that has preoccupied their government--and many of them--since Elian was rescued by fishermen and taken
in by his relatives in Miami last November after a shipwreck in which his mother perished.
"If his mother had survived, if she had made it, it would have been a different story," said one construction worker in a typical comment. "I'm glad he's with his father."
"What will be interesting now," the diplomat said, "is to see how they wind down" the Cuban public from the all-Elian, all-the-time atmosphere that has prevailed since November.
In public statements so far, the government has given no indication that it intends to wind down at all. Attempting a quick segue into the "next stage of the battle," the government plans a huge rally Saturday in the eastern city of Manzanillo to protest the U.S. economic embargo and
immigration policies it says encourage Cubans to risk their lives on shaky rafts traveling across the Florida Straits.
Alarcon said the Elian saga has brought fundamental changes in the American public's view of Cuba because of the intensely reported controversy that surrounded Elian's rescue and the legal and political struggle of his Miami relatives to prevent his return to Cuba.
"Relations . . . were upgraded in terms of information," Alarcon said. "Millions of Americans who probably didn't even know what Cuba was were exposed every day to some story regarding Cuba. That doesn't mean it was always favorable to Cuba. But it was important to have more
Americans thinking about relations, discovering, asking questions."
And in what Cuban officials seem to regard as the most satisfying result of all, he said "millions of Americans discovered what Cubans in Cuba refer to as the mafia"--the Miami-based Cuban American activists who have long been an effective lobby against the Castro government and strong
advocates of the U.S. economic embargo that is a major thorn in Castro's side. "They chose the wrong issue, and they handled it in a very stupid way," Alarcon said.
It is not clear how the government intends to use the new vigor it believes it has gotten from Elian's travails, or how long the domestic euphoria will last. Nor does Havana seem certain of how to capitalize on the newfound attention it has captured in the United States or how it can use that to
alter trade and immigration arrangements with Washington.
Although he repeated Cuba's criticism of an agreement struck this week among House Republicans that would loosen the 41-year-old U.S. embargo in some ways but tighten it in others, Alarcon said the GOP debate itself was "in a more general sense, a reflection of a process that won't be
stopped."
"The fact is," he said, "this is a train that will continue to roll."
Meanwhile, the center of Cuba's attention was nowhere to be seen. After being whisked from Jose Marti International Airport moments after arrival with his family, Elian remained behind the walls of a government residence in the capital. Today's edition of Granma, the Communist Party daily,
bannered "Home at Last" and filled half its eight pages with Elian news and photographs.
Although the government said some months ago that the boy might have to remain in seclusion for several months to cleanse him of the aftereffects of his U.S. sojourn, Alarcon said Elian will return to his home town of Cardenas, 90 miles east of Havana, "much, much, much sooner than the two-
or three-month period" originally discussed.
Alarcon said the seclusion was necessary not for the brainwashing that Elian's Miami relatives predicted, but to protect a boy who has been surrounded by gawkers, cameras and law enforcement officers for months. Just as in the United States, he said, Cubans want to see Elian, want to touch him.
The timing of Elian's return had provided an advantage in giving him a soft landing here, Alarcon said. At the end of the last week of the Cuban school year, it was easier for the family to return home to a normal life.
Over the long term, Alarcon predicted, Elian's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, whose face has been plastered on nearly as many billboards here as his son's, will have a harder time.
"He may do some other things, but my impression is he doesn't like" the spotlight. "He likes the small-town life," Alarcon said, adding that he anticipates Gonzalez will return to his job as gatekeeper at a tourist facility in the Cuban resort of Veradero.
For the government, Juan Miguel's steadfast insistence that he and Elian would return to Cuba no matter what blandishments the United States might offer gave Cuba a major propaganda point, Alarcon said. The Miami relatives and their supporters, he said, overplayed their contention "that
America is paradise and Cuba is hell . . . the myth that all of Cuba is a nation seeking to escape."
That notion was particularly vivid in Cuba, he said, because for the first time, the state-controlled media provided extensive coverage of the Cuban exile community, as they behaved in a way many here found offensive. Describing the broadcasts as a 'drastic change' in government policy, Alarcon
asked, "When was the last time you could quote a member of the Cuban exile community in the Cuban media, almost on a daily basis?".
Will the new media freedom be extended to local dissidents to criticize their own government? "No, of course not," Alarcon said. "That's not exactly the idea."
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