Exiles' role in Florida vote enhances clout
By Alfredo S. Lanier. Tribune Staff Writer.
Chicago Tribune. January 1, 2001
The vote tallying in Florida is over, but the jockeying by Miami's
overwhelmingly Republican and conservative Cuban-American community to influence
the incoming administration of George W. Bush is just heating up.
Bush's razor-thin victory in Florida is certain to focus attention on the
agenda of the staunchly anti-communist, wealthy and politically active exile
community, which voted 4-1 for the Republican presidential ticket.
"The Cuban-America community was instrumental in Bush's election, and
everything that he has said on the topic of Cuba has been very firm and strong,"
said Dennis Hays, executive vice-president of the Cuban-American National
Foundation, the best connected and financed of all exile organizations. "For
the past couple of years we have been on the defensive on the issue of Castro
and we expect to change that."
For more than two decades, Florida's Cuban exile community has been a
pivotal constituency in a state considered by some as essential to winning the
White House.
Yet both the foundation and other hard-line anti-Castro groups are still
smarting from the defeat in the custody battle over Elian Gonzalez last summer,
in which they invested a tremendous amount of political capital.
The exiles' role in the latest presidential race is no fluke. If anything,
their national political clout is likely to increase, according to some
analysts. Figures recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau estimate that
Florida will gain two congressional seats and increase its number of
presidential electors.
The nomination of Mel Martinez as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
in the new Bush administration, the first Cuban-American to reach a
Cabinet-level position, is bound to enhance the exiles' political muscle in the
capital.
Moreover, the upcoming re-election campaign of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush--who
has been described as an "honorary Cuban" for his consistently
pro-exile stances--will need a strong boost from Cuban-American voters and
financial supporters.
"We are going to see both parties actively courting the Cuban-American
vote like never in the past," said Dario Moreno, a political science
professor at Florida International University in Miami. He also predicts that
one of Florida's two new congressional seats will go to a Cuban-American.
Even before taking office, Bush faces a bitter dispute over the use of
frozen Cuban government assets to compensate the families of Cuban-Americans
shot down by the Cuban air force in 1996. In retaliation, Cuban leader Fidel
Castro imposed a tax on phone calls between the two countries and phone service
has been virtually shut down.
Though not completely monolithic in their politics, Miami's Cuban-American
voters have effectively used their votes, money and political savvy to stave off
attempts by Republicans or Democrats to loosen the U.S.-imposed economic and
political noose around the neck of the Castro regime.
The centerpiece of American policy toward Cuba for about 38 years has been a
trade embargo that seeks to topple the Castro government by choking its economy.
The embargo was tightened in 1996 by the Helms-Burton Act, which seeks to
penalize third countries that profit by using assets in Cuba formerly owned by
U.S. citizens.
Helms-Burton, however, has been such an irritant with U.S. trading
partners--who consider it an unwarranted intrusion into their trade
relations--that the Clinton administration has waived two of the act's most
controversial provisions.
Hays said the Cuban-American National Foundation would like to see Bush
enforce all of Helms-Burton. Critics argue that the likely confrontation that
would ensue with U.S. commercial allies makes full enforcement unlikely.
"To tighten the embargo is a fantasy," said Delvis Fernandez-Levy,
executive director of the Cuban American Alliance, which favors an easing of
trade with Cuba. "It would put Bush in conflict with other factions in the
Republican Party that favor more normal trade relations."
Indeed, any toughening of the embargo likely would rankle Republican
big-business interests, which have been lobbying the White House and Congress
for the past few years to do the opposite. The ban on the sale of food and
medicine to the island was eased last summer, though it prohibits American banks
from financing any trade deals.
Among Republicans who pushed the hardest for lifting the embargo were Sen.
John Ashcroft (R-Mo.)--Bush's nominee to be attorney general--and Illinois Gov.
George Ryan. Earlier this year, Ryan flew to Cuba and met with Castro.
"If anything, Congress is moving in the direction of lifting the
embargo and the travel bans on Cuba," said Phil Peters, a Cuba specialist
at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
He and others suggest that the two competing views on the embargo likely
will cancel each other out, leaving present regulations essentially intact.
"There might just be an increase in the rhetoric against Castro as a
way of justifying the status quo with regard to Cuba," said John Kavulich,
president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, which provides economic
and trade information.
But Hays argued that there are plenty of ways for the Bush administration to
tighten the vise on the Castro regime, apart from the embargo and other economic
sanctions.
He said a possible legislative package could allow more direct U.S. aid to
dissidents, entrepreneurs and other individuals on the island as a way of
undermining Castro's grip on the population.
"The real issue is how to get more help directly to people on the
island," he said. | 