By Karen DeYoung and Eric Pianin. Washington Post Staff Writers. Tuesday, May 23, 2000; Page A01
Republican leaders are working overtime this week to persuade Congress to normalize trade relations with China's communist government. Since American goods come with American values, said House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), free trade means "spreading freedom all over China."
Less publicly, but with almost as much zeal, those same leaders are also working this week to block a measure allowing minimal trade with Cuba's communist government.
"It's very easy to see the distinction" between the two cases, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) told reporters yesterday. "And if you all can't see it, I don't know. Maybe you're just blind to it."
But it's a distinction that has eluded an increasing number of congressional Republicans, some of whom have dug in their heels to demand the leadership allow a long-avoided vote on a partial lifting of economic sanctions against Cuba.
As the United States has expanded trade and diplomatic relationships with China and Vietnam, and extended carrots toward North Korea, policy toward Cuba has remained in a class by itself, exempt from the usual arguments of globalization, strategic nudging and commercial competition.
For most of the four decades since sanctions were first put in place, those who advocated "spreading freedom" via engagement and trade with Cuba--primarily Democrats of the leftist persuasion--made little headway against the arguments of anti-communism. The Clinton administration's
early efforts toward normal relations with Havana stopped abruptly in 1996, when the Cuban government shot down two civilian aircraft being flown by anti-Castro activists in international airspace.
But now, when even those of the rightist persuasion argue for engagement with the world's reigning communist behemoth in Beijing, the reasons for continuing isolation of Havana are being challenged as never before.
"If you think China is more likely to change politically if it's brought into global economic relations, then why not apply the same logic to Cuba?" said Thomas Mann, a government affairs expert with the Brookings Institution. "The politics are different. It's Cuba's proximity.
It's the presence of Cuban Americans in the States. . . . It's the fact that a comparable sort of business lobby has not developed for Cuba as is clearly present for China."
And, as Lott pointed out, it's Fidel Castro. "Castro has shown no repentance," Lott said. "He is running a dictatorship, a repressive dictatorship." Cuba, said Lott, during the week of upbeat assessments of China, "is the only remaining communist country in the world
except for North Korea."
With diminished state control and increased tolerance of private entrepreneurship, China has begun to open its economy in ways that are still anathema in Cuba's tightly controlled system. Yet in terms of personal and political freedoms, the State Department's descriptions of the two countries
are remarkably similar.
"The People's Republic of China is an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party is the paramount source of power," said the department's human rights report released last February. "Citizens lack both the freedom peacefully to express opposition to the Party-led
political system and the right to change their national leaders or form of government. . . . Prison conditions at most facilities remained harsh."
"Cuba," this year's report said, "is a totalitarian state controlled by President Fidel Castro, who is Chief of State, Head of Government, First Secretary of the Communist Party and commander in chief of its armed forces. . . . Citizens do not have the right to change their
government peacefully. . . . Prison conditions remained harsh."
Robert R. Neal, an aide to Rep. George R. Nethercutt (R-Wash.), the sponsor of a measure to lift the U.S. trade embargo on food and medicine sales to Cuba, said the GOP leadership is in an interesting spot: "You further democratic interests in China by trading with them. On the other hand,
you embolden the communist leadership in Cuba by trading with them."
This is the third year in a row Nethercutt, a conservative who serves on the House Appropriations agriculture subcommittee, has proposed lifting unilateral sanctions on shipments of food and medicine on Cuba and other countries. But it's the first time he has come so close to succeeding--thanks
to an expanding coalition of market-seeking farm-state Republicans and liberal Democrats that passed a similar measure in the Senate last year and again last month.
Last year, Nethercutt's measure went down to defeat, 28 to 24, in the full Appropriations Committee. This year, despite extensive lobbying against it by DeLay, it passed 35 to 24. Now the House leadership, eager to pass the agricultural appropriations bill to which it is attached, is searching
for ways to strip it out.
The easiest way is for the Rules Committee--where Cuban American Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) usually has his way on anything related to Cuba--to subject it to a parliamentary motion that would make it easy to kill it on the House floor.
But Nethercutt and his supporters believe they have enough Republicans willing to join with Democrats to send the bill back to committee if the Rules Committee tries to do that. That would delay passage of an overall appropriations bill the leadership wants to see passed before the Memorial Day
recess begins at the end of this week.
As of last night, negotiations were continuing with the committee.
"I need to stand up for the farmers in my district," Nethercutt said, citing those who want to sell peas and lentils to Cuba as well as those seeking to recapture wheat sales lost when sanctions were imposed on Iran.
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