By Karen DeYoung. Washington Post Staff Writer. Monday, February 21, 2000; Page A02
But Lawmakers Who Question Sanctions Can Face 'Bad Day'
Conservative Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) has made only one major detour during his three-term focus on domestic economic issues. Following two trips to Cuba--one in 1997 and one last October--he proposed easing a 40-year policy of unilateral sanctions he has concluded accomplish little for either
the Cuban or American people.
Cuban American members have complained, he said, and he has gotten a few anonymous telephone calls threatening his political future. But for the most part, his efforts to push new legislation about Cuba have been ignored by his House colleagues.
Sanford's brief foray into foreign policy is instructive on at least two levels. It is an example of the small but growing number of unlikely holes being punched in the hard line on Cuba. Last year, a number of farm-state Republicans, led by conservative Sen. John D. Ashcroft (Mo.), joined with
traditional liberals to win a Senate vote to end unilateral U.S. embargoes on food shipments to Cuba and elsewhere. Few months pass without a delegation of American legislators of all stripes traveling to the communist bastion.
But Sanford's experience is equally illustrative of why the hard line is likely to hold for some time to come. Where it counts--among those who control the business of Congress, especially in the House--there is steadfast opposition to change. That being the case, many members who rarely give a
passing thought to Cuba have concluded that only knaves or fools stick their heads above the parapet.
"You know that if you kick the Cuba issue, you're going to have a bad day," said former representative David Skaggs (D-Colo.), who clashed with the hard line on Havana, and paid for it with lost funding for his district. "Other than to about 10 members, it doesn't matter that
much. [But] when there are a few people who will die for the issue, and nobody else gets anywhere close to that, they can have their way."
The frequent suggestion that those who lead the pro-sanctions movement are emotion-charged beyond reason infuriates Rep. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), one of three Cuban Americans in Congress. He compared the passion of Cubans in this country to that of Irish Americans or Jewish Americans who seek to
influence foreign policy.
For those "on our side," he said, keeping the strongest pressure on Cuba until its repressive government changes "goes to the core of their values--a belief in democracy and human rights." Even Sanford's modest recent proposal to end restrictions on American travel to the
island, he said, means "money for Cuba" and delays the day of reckoning for 73-year-old President Fidel Castro.
On the other side many liberals, and the occasional conservative iconoclast, have been drawn to equally traditional arguments. Led most prominently by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), they believe that years of U.S. economic and diplomatic isolation have hurt
the Cuban people and given Castro a rallying cry, and that intransigence on Cuba is inconsistent with friendly policies toward equally repressive communist regimes in Vietnam and China.
After years of losing battles, their numbers have recently been bolstered with help from some of the country's most powerful economic forces. Major agribusiness companies, and organizations including the American Farm Bureau and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, oppose unilateral sanctions overall
and see Cuba as one of several potential new venues for U.S. goods and investment. Their pressure on members to change their views and their votes has met with some success, most prominently with last summer's sanctions-lifting vote in the Senate.
"I've always said that the embargo is going to end when Wall Street wants it to end," said Serrano. "What has surprised me now is what I would call moderate to conservative Democrats and Republicans who see the need to have their farmers sell food."
Serrano and others believe that the hard line may finally have overreached with the Elian Gonzalez case. The GOP leadership strongly supported and predicted quick passage of measures to make the shipwrecked boy a U.S. citizen and prevent the Clinton administration from sending him home. But a
significant number of members have signaled that they they think Elian should be reunited with his father in Cuba, and the bills are languishing.
The general public pays little attention to Cuba issues, said Skaggs, who joined the Aspen Institute after his 1998 retirement from Congress. But with the Elian case, he said, the public may have realized that the hard-liners are "out of sync" with their values. "Maybe this will
start to contribute to some diminishment of their authority generally on Cuba matters."
Menendez disagrees. "Those who believe Elian is a weather vane for broader implications in Congress are mistaken."
The forces arrayed on both sides of the wider Cuba debate are formidable, and passions run high on both sides. Within the Hispanic Caucus, opinions on Cuba diverge so widely that members have agreed not to discuss it. Cuban-born Miami Reps. Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the only
two Republican Hispanics in Congress, resigned from the caucus in 1997 over its failure to support isolation of Cuba.
In the middle stands the Clinton administration, which tends toward normalization, but sees no political advantage in a unilateral move toward Cuba. While supporting the legislative hard line, it works within the margins of executive prerogatives to narrow the sanctions restrictions.
Menendez, the New York-born child of Cuban immigrants, says he is a frequent adviser to the administration on Cuba issues. His New Jersey district includes the largest concentration of Cuban Americans outside of southern Florida, and he is the only Latino in a congressional leadership position,
as vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus.
While Menendez and like-minded Democrats from states with strong Cuban American constituencies, including Sens. Bob Graham (Fla.) and Robert G. Torricelli (N.J.), lobby colleagues on their side of the aisle, Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen have had a somewhat easier time persuading GOP House
members to support continuing sanctions and isolation of the Castro regime.
Their efforts are aided by Diaz-Balart's seat on the Rules Committee, which decides which legislation will reach the House floor, and strong sanctions support from Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) and other GOP leaders. Together they can and do assure that proposed legislation like Sanford's is
dead on arrival.
Money and lobbying muscle flows freely to both sides of the debate. But for years, the unchallenged big gun on Cuba policy has been the Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation, which strongly backs the hard line.
A 1997 report by the Center for Public Integrity identified the foundation as not only "the most potent voice on U.S. policy toward Cuba," but "dollar for dollar, arguably the most effective" lobbying force in Washington. From its 1981 founding until 1997, the report said,
the foundation funneled approximately $3.2 million into the U.S. political system. The foundation has financed much of the attempt by Elian Gonzalez's Miami relatives to keep him in this country.
It claims credit for the current pillars of sanctions policy--Radio and TV Marti, a $28 million-a-year taxpayer-financed system broadcasting into Cuba, along with the embargo-tightening Cuban Democracy Act in 1992 and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act.
The foundation tends to remember its friends and punish its enemies without regard to party affiliation. Florida and New Jersey members, along with supporters in positions of power, have traditionally been among the biggest recipients of donations from foundation individuals and the
organization's Free Cuba PAC.
But others who are less visibly associated with the foundation's causes are also remembered, such as House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy (R.I.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who has been in the forefront of calls to keep
Elian Gonzalez in Miami. The two top Senate recipients so far in the current campaign cycle are Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Charles S. Robb (D-Va.).
Those who antagonize the foundation can expect a quick response. The morning after Skaggs succeeded in temporarily killing funds for TV Marti in July 1993, he was confronted by an angry Diaz-Balart who, Skaggs said in an impassioned floor speech that afternoon, threatened "that if I
followed through with my plans, he would do all he could to go after everything he could find that was important to me."
That same day, Diaz-Balart used a parliamentary "point of order" to ax millions in federal funds for Skagg's Colorado district, as the foundation was faxing a gloating press release detailing the maneuver, and the reason for it, to every major newspaper in the state.
"We only go after people who come after us," Jose Cardenas, the foundation's Washington director, said in a recent interview.
While acknowledging that "there are [now] some different dynamics in the debate," Cardenas said, "there is a big difference between issuing press releases that you want U.S. policy to change, going down on these pilgrimages to Havana and being wined and dined by the dictator, and
actually effecting policy change."
Cardenas dismissed purported changes of heart on sanctions by Ashcroft and others. "He's got an agricultural state and a very tough race against a popular governor," he said of the Missourian. The Senate vote "was more a bone to the farm lobby. . . . I think he knew it was not
going to go anywhere in the House."
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