Tonight on Radio FreeRepublic
Unspun with AnnaZ
October 23rd, 2003 -- 10pmE/7pmP
"At least when right-wingers rant, there's a point!"
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!"
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]