By Tom Carter. The
Washington Times. April 5, 2001
A new Republican-led advocacy group in Washington says it will lobby to
lift the 37-year-old U.S. embargo of Cuba and hopes to supplant the influence of
the pro-embargo Cuban American National Foundation.
"The main focus of the group will be to look at U.S.-Cuba policy
again," Sally Grooms Cowal, president of the Cuba Policy Foundation (CPF),
said yesterday. "In 40 years, the embargo has not served to bring about
democracy in Cuba. It is a failed policy."
Ms. Grooms Cowal, formerly a career diplomat, is president of the
lobby.
William Rogers, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs
in the Ford administration, is chairman.
The group is funded by the Arca Foundation, a philanthropic
organization headed by Democratic fund-raiser and heir to the R.J. Reynolds
tobacco fortune, Smith Bagley.
None of the three is Cuban-American.
Ms. Grooms Cowal said CPF will argue that Americans are losing millions
of dollars in trade by maintaining an ineffective embargo.
She said the group's ideological impetus grew out of the recent report
by the Council on Foreign Relations, which made arguments for and against
lifting the embargo.
CPF's inaugural press releases do not mention Cuba's abysmal human
rights record, but Ms. Grooms Cowal said her group would not be "an
apologist for the regime."
Ms. Grooms Cowal, who was a U.S. representative to the U.N. Human
Rights Commission, said CFP would support a denunciation of Cuba's human rights
record by the international body, which is meeting in Geneva.
"I would support an examination of Cuba's record and a
condemnation in Geneva," she said.
Opposition leaders in Cuba are reporting a crackdown on dissidents. In
one incident, reported last week by Cuba's best-known dissident, Elizardo
Sanchez, Cuban state security beat a blind dissident and then dumped him in the
countryside.
Ms. Grooms Cowal said the embargo policy should be re-examined through
dialogue and has challenged Jorge Mas, president of the Cuban American National
Foundation (CANF), to a series of debates.
She said she hoped to convince Secretary of State Colin Powell and
President Bush's nominee for assistant secretary of state Inter-American
affairs, Otto Reich, to accept her view.
Messrs. Mas, Powell and Reich all have made public statements backing
the embargo.
"Other people have become converts. I hope to be able to talk with
them," she said.
Dennis Hays, an ambassador in the Clinton administration who now heads
the pro-embargo CANF Washington office, said Mr. Mas has no plans to accept Ms.
Grooms Cowal's offer to debate.
"There is no reason to debate. But, I am on a panel with Sally
next month in Miami," said Mr. Hays. "It is a small circle of people
who think about Cuba. We all know each other. We will run into each other. I
can't imagine what new this new group will bring to the debate."
While touting their "centrist," "nonpartisan" and "Republican"
credentials, Mr. Hays said, the CPF is none of the above in regard to its
personnel, funding and agenda.
"I was an ambassador under a Democratic administration. That
doesn't make me a Democrat," he said. "Arca is a very partisan group
that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get the embargo
lifted, and they have failed miserably."
Arca Foundation records say it has spent more than $3 million since
1995 in its unsuccessful effort to lift the U.S. embargo on Cuba.
© 2001 News World Communications, Inc. |