Tonight on Radio FreeRepublic
Unspun with AnnaZ
October 23rd, 2003 -- 10pmE/7pmP
"At least when right-wingers rant, there's a point!"
Posted on 10/23/2003 3:31:01 PM PDT by mgist
Senate Votes to End Limits on Cuba Travel
WASHINGTON - The Senate joined the House on Thursday in striking at the four-decade-old policy of making travel to Cuba a criminal act, putting Congress on a collision course with Bush administration efforts to step up enforcement of travel restrictions.
"The travel ban does nothing to hurt Fidel Castro (news - web sites)," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. "It only harms Americans." He was co-sponsor of the measure, passed 59-36, that bars use of government money to enforce current travel restrictions.
Last month, the House approved identical language in its version of a $90 billion bill to fund Transportation and Treasury department (news - web sites) programs in the budget year that started Oct. 1.
The votes in the two GOP-controlled chambers came despite a White House warning that the president would be advised to veto the bill if it includes the Cuba provision. The legislation contains vital money for highways, law enforcement and anti-terrorism.
The White House said in a statement that unlicensed tourism "provides economic resources to the Castro regime while doing nothing to help the Cuban people."
In neither the Senate nor House did the Cuba vote reach the two-thirds margin needed to overturn a presidential veto. House and Senate leaders must negotiate a final compromise on the spending bill; in the past, they have used this process to remove language approved earlier that would have eased penalties against Cuba.
But Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said the Senate vote was "a strong repudiation of the president's recent announcement that his administration plans to tighten and increase the travel restrictions."
The Homeland Security Department announced this month that it was enhancing efforts to curtail illegal travel and transport of goods to Cuba.
Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, a co-sponsor with Dorgan, said fighting terrorism and drug trafficking should be a higher priority than Cuban tourism. He said a Treasury office was spending 10 percent of its budget "to track down little old grammas from the West Coast who through a Canadian travel agency chose to bike in Cuba."
The Treasury Department estimates that about 160,000 Americans, half of them Cuban-Americans visiting family members, traveled to Cuba legally last year. Humanitarian and educational groups, journalists and diplomats are also allowed visits, but thousands of other Americans visit illegally, by way of third countries, risking thousands of dollars in fines and imprisonment.
Tourism officials have estimated that as many as 1 million Americans might visit Cuba in the first year after the lifting of the embargo.
President Kennedy imposed the travel ban in 1963, a year after the Cuban missile crisis. President Carter let it lapse in 1977, but it was reimposed by President Reagan in 1982. Violators could face criminal penalties of up to $250,000 and 10 years in prison.
Free-trade Republicans, mostly from farm states, have joined liberal Democrats in recent years in questioning the effectiveness of the trade and travel embargoes, saying that the Cuban president has used them to his own advantage to avoid liberalizing contacts with Americans.
Congress loosened the trade embargo in 2000 to allow sale of agricultural products and medicine on a cash-only basis.
The House, along with its vote last month on the travel restrictions, lifted caps on money that can be sent to Cuban family members on the island.
The CIA has a 40 year plus record of mucking up in Cuba. Anybody else in another job would have been fired in a few weeks/months. What a bunch of losers.
The travel ban to Cuba was a "feel better" for the failure of the U.S. government to get rid of Castro and to appease the Cuban community in the U.S. to get votes. Why can we go to Red China but not Cuba? Hogwash.
Of course, the efficiencies of Castro's criminal justice system do seem to be desireable (end of trial to execution in six days) and, maybe, that is what the neocommunists see.
Tonight on Radio FreeRepublic
Unspun with AnnaZ
October 23rd, 2003 -- 10pmE/7pmP
"At least when right-wingers rant, there's a point!"
Which is why I think any more bans are just ridiculous and a waste of time/money.
Nothing we have done in the past four decades has made Cuba any freer or come any closer to getting Castro out.
I say open it up to tourism, get a lot of Americans in Cuba, get out amongst the Cuban people and get some awareness of what capitalism and democracy could do for them, so that when Castro kicks the bucket we can get some real change going.
The 59-38 vote came two weeks after Bush, in a Rose Garden ceremony, announced that he would tighten the travel ban in an attempt to halt illegal tourism there and to bring more pressure on the regime of Fidel Castro.
The House has repeatedly approved legislation to ease the travel ban, including a vote last month approving language virtually identical to that in the Senate measure by 227-188. But on previous efforts, the House leadership has been able to use backroom maneuvers to bottle it up.
Thursday's vote was the first time the Senate has loosened the ban.
The Senate vote placed the president and GOP congressional leaders uncomfortably on a collision course, leaving an angry White House threatening to veto an important spending bill that contained the provision easing the travel restrictions.
In the final dash to approve sweeping appropriations bills at the end of the fiscal year, it remains uncertain whether the White House threat is a negotiation ploy and whether supporters of looser travel restrictions could muster a two-thirds majority to override a veto.
The vote also highlighted a widening split between two important GOP constituencies: farm-state Republicans, who oppose trade sanctions in general or are eager to increase sales to Cuba, and Cuban-American leaders, who want to curb travel and trade to punish Castro.
The White House views Cuban-Americans as essential to Bush's re-election prospects in Florida. The Senate last rejected an easing of travel restrictions in 1999, by a vote of 43-55. But in an indication of how much the political and policy pendulum has swung, 13 senators who voted against easing the travel ban four years ago switched sides and voted for it on Thursday.
Several influential Republican senators voted against the president, including Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the chairman of the armed services committee, and Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of the intelligence committee, as well as many conservatives from farming states, including Sens. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, Sam Brownback of Kansas, and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.
Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., who co-sponsored the amendment, criticized what he called a U.S. "stranglehold" on Cuba, a nation of 11 million less than 100 miles from the United States. The decades-old travel ban, he said, merely deepens Cubans' misery without providing fresh ideas to the communist nation.
"Unilateral sanctions stop not just the flow of goods, but the flow of ideas," Enzi said. "Ideas of freedom and democracy are the keys to positive change in any nation."
The White House countered that allowing unfettered American travel to Cuba would provide Castro's government with an economic bonanza, allowing him to cover up his shortcomings as a repressive dictator.
On Oct. 10, Bush defended tight restrictions, saying that U.S. tourist dollars go to the Cuban government, which "pays the workers a pittance in worthless pesos and keeps the hard currency to prop up the dictator and his cronies."
" Illegal tourism perpetuates the misery of the Cuban people," the president said.
The vote came on an amendment to the $90 billion spending bill for the Treasury and Transportation departments. The senior administration official said the president's advisers would recommend that he veto the bill if it emerges from a House-Senate conference committee with the amendment still in it.
The president's adherence to a hard-line policy identified with the most conservative exile groups has increasingly left him at odds with Congress. In 2000, lawmakers, under pressure from the farm lobby, approved the limited sale of food and medicines to the island; since then, Cuba has bought $282 million in agricultural goods, according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. [End]
I keep seeing this type of response, and no personal offense intended, but it really shows a lack of insight on the issue. Either this reflects complete ignorance, or the spouting-off of the typical leftist retorts.
PLEASE NOTE:
1. - The prime beneficiaries of easing restrictions are the Castro brothers--Fidel and Raúl-and the regime itself. Cuba's Armed Forces Ministry (MINFAR) runs all the state-owned or joint-venture tourist resorts. Profits from these enterprises partly sustain the private fortunes of the Castros and provide revenues to run the government that Cuba's decrepit sugar mills and Soviet-style state enterprises never could support.
2. - Tourist expansion was the key to Castro's survival after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of subsidies of up to $5.6 billion per year. Since Sept. 11, however, travel to Cuba has fallen off and island hotels have experienced vacancy rates as high as 30 percent.
3. - The recent decline in tourism only adds to the dictatorhip's financial worries. Cuba has defaulted on over $500 million in loans, and France and the Netherlands have frozen Cuban credit for nonpayment of arrears. The U.S. legislators clammoring to "open up trade" for their agricultural states, are basically pushing each other trying to get in-line to do business with "Chapter 11" country, that is on the verge of "Chapter 7" - and some of us in the U.S. want to save the regime from shutting down and closing up shop for good.
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