[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 24 (Tuesday, February 27, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1632-S1633]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. BAUCUS (for himself, Mr. Roberts, and Mrs. Lincoln):
  S. 401. A bill to normalize trade relations with Cuba, and for other 
purposes; to the Committee on Finance.
  S. 402. A bill to make an exception to the United States embargo on 
trade with Cuba for the export of agricultural commodities, medicines, 
medical supplies, medical instruments, or medical equipment and for 
other purposes; to the Committee on Finance.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, I am introducing today a series of bills 
that would end the embargo on trade with Cuba and normalize our 
economic relations with this country that is a mere ninety miles off 
our shore. I should add that Congressman Charles Rangel is offering a 
set of companion bills in the House today.
  Last July, I led a small group of Senators to Havana. During our 
brief visit, we met with Fidel Castro. But we also spent three hours 
with a group of six dissidents who had spent years in prison, yet have 
chosen heroically to continue their dissent from within Cuba. We met 
with the leader of Cuba's largest independent NGO. It was clear to me 
that our Cuba policy was outdated and needed fundamental change.
  I have long fought against unilateral economic sanctions, unless our 
national security was at stake. The Cuba embargo is a unilateral 
sanction, but our national security is not at stake. The Defense 
Department has concluded that Cuba does not represent any security 
threat to this nation. None of our closest allies supports the embargo. 
Nor do any of our trading partners in the Americas.
  Unilateral sanctions do not work. The embargo has not changed the 
behavior of the Cuban government and its leadership. It has not changed 
the behavior of Fidel Castro. But the embargo has hurt the people of 
Cuba. And the embargo has hurt American farmers and businesses, as our 
Asian, European, and Canadian competitors have rushed in to fill the 
gap in the Cuban market.
  The U.S. International Trade Commission released a report on the 
economic impact of U.S. sanctions on Cuba. The ITC found that the 
embargo costs US exporters, farmers, manufacturers, and service 
providers between $650 million and one billion dollars a year in lost 
sales. This is intolerable.
  We should lift the embargo. We should engage Cuba economically. We 
should engage the people of Cuba.
  The bills I am introducing today do just that. The first bill, on 
which I am joined by Senators Roberts, Lincoln, and Dorgan, is the 
``Free Trade with Cuba Act'', that would lift the embargo completely. 
The second bill, on which I am joined by Senators Roberts and Lincoln, 
is the ``United States-Cuba Trade Act of 2001'', that would remove Cuba 
from Jackson-Vanik treatment and provide normal trade relations status 
on a permanent basis. The third bill, on which I am also joined by 
Senators Roberts and Lincoln, is the ``Cuban Humanitarian Trade Act of 
2001'', that removes the restrictions on food and medicine exports 
imposed in the last Congress, repeals the codification of travel 
restrictions, and removes limitations on remittances to individual 
Cuban citizens.
  I am not suggesting that we embrace Fidel Castro. Far from it! His 
leadership, his treatment of his own people, his failed economic, 
political, and social policies--these are unacceptable to all 
Americans. But the world has changed since the United States initiated 
the embargo forty years and ten Presidents ago. It does us no good to 
wait until Castro is gone from the scene before we begin to develop 
normal relations with the Cuban people and with Cuba's future leaders. 
If we fail to develop those relationships now, the inevitable 
transition to democracy and a market economy will be much harder on all 
of the Cuban people. And events in Cuba could easily escalate out of 
control and put the United States in the middle of a dangerous domestic 
crisis on the island.
  Jim Hoagland, in a recent Washington Post column, wrote about his 
concern ``when sanctions linger too long and become a political 
football and a substitute for policy, as is the case today in Cuba.'' 
This accurately describes where we are today.
  To help further edify my colleagues on this issue, I would like to 
enter into the record a column from the February 9 Wall Street Journal 
by Philip Peters, Vice President of the Lexington Institute, who 
explains how changes in U.S. policy can help the Cuban people who 
continue to suffer under Castro's policies of political and economic 
repression.
  The three bills that I am offering today serve our national interest, 
will

[[Page S1633]]

help us move toward a peaceful transition in the post-Castro era, and 
will help the Cuban people now. I urge support from all my colleagues.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that additional material be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

            [From the Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2001]

          ``Let Yankee Tourists Shower Dollars on Cuba's Poor"

                           (By Philip Peters)

       In her final press conference as Secretary of State, 
     Madeleine Albright's message to the Cuban people was 
     succinct. In reference to the aging Fidel Castro she said, 
     ``I wish them the actuarial tables.'' It was an odd statement 
     on behalf of a superpower that could have used the previous 
     eight years to exercise considerable influence on its small 
     island neighbor.
       It was also a fitting end to the Clinton administration's 
     passive approach to Cuba policy, where the impulse to 
     reassess strategy was nearly always trumped by the imperative 
     of avoiding political risk in Florida. Even in 1998, when 
     Republican leaders such as Sen. John Warner and former 
     Secretary of State George Shultz urged the creation of a 
     presidential bipartisan commission--a golden opportunity to 
     conduct a long overdue post-Cold War review that could have 
     included the full range of Cuban-American voices--politics 
     held the Clinton White House back.
       President Bush has an opportunity to make a fresh start. 
     Today's strict embargo policy, based on the goal of denying 
     hard currency to the Cuban government, made sense during the 
     Cold War when Cuba was a genuine security threat and 
     Washington had reason to make Cuba an expensive satellite for 
     the Soviet Union to maintain.
       Today, with sanctions twice tightened during the 1990s, 
     Fidel Castro remains firmly in power. With the Soviet-era 
     security threat gone, it is time to recognize that isolating 
     Cuba from commerce and contact with Americans is 
     counterproductive because it reduces American influence in 
     Cuba. President Bush's Cuba policy is not yet defined, but 
     Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that ``We will only 
     participate in those activities with Cuba that benefit the 
     people directly and not the government.''
       This standard sounds good in theory, but in practice it is 
     impossible to achieve. Virtually every form of economic 
     activity with Cuba benefits both the people and the 
     government. Today, European and Canadian trade, investment 
     and tourism benefit Cuban state enterprises. But they also 
     increase the earnings of Cuban workers, expose Cubans to 
     foreigners and non-socialist ideas, bring capitalist business 
     practices, and reshape the Cuban economy to fit its 
     comparative advantages in the global system. This adds up to 
     humanitarian benefits for the Cuban people, and a head start 
     on a future transition to a more market-oriented economy.
       U.S. economic activity also benefits both the state and the 
     people of Cuba. Family remittances, estimated by the United 
     Nations at over $700 million annually, bring more foreign 
     exchange than sugar exports. Many of these dollars land in 
     the Cuban treasury when Cubans spend them in state retail 
     stores. U.S.-Cuba phone connections allow families to 
     communicate, but generate over $70 million a year for the 
     state phone company. A strict application of Secretary 
     Powell's own standard would cut off these valuable benefits.
       The trick, then, for an administration that seems to want 
     to end unilateral trade sanctions everywhere but Cuba, will 
     not be to reach for Secretary Powell's unattainable standard. 
     Rather, it will be to choose among forms of engagement that 
     serve America's humanitarian interest in helping Cubans to 
     prosper, our long-term economic interest of nudging Cuba 
     toward a market economy, and our political interest in 
     exposing Cubans to Americans and American ideas.
       President Bush could begin by supporting the congressional 
     consensus, expressed last year by greater than three-to-one 
     majorities in the House and Senate, to lift all restrictions 
     on food and medicine sales. This step would begin to reverse 
     the implicit assumption in U.S. policy that American 
     interests are somehow served if products such as rice, 
     powdered milk, and drugs are more scarce or expensive for 
     Cubans to acquire. It would also support the calls by Cuban 
     dissidents such as Elizardo Sanchez and the Christian 
     Liberation Movement for an end to this part of the embargo. 
     It ``hurts the people, not the regime,'' Mr. Sanchez says, 
     and is ``an odd way of demonstrating support for human 
     rights.''
       President Bush could then end all restrictions on Cuban-
     American remittances, now limited to $1,200 a year, and on 
     family visits, which are permitted only in cases of 
     ``humanitarian emergency'' a cruel regulation that forces 
     families to lie by the thousands each December when they 
     visit relatives at Christmas.
       Finally, the president could support an end to the travel 
     ban imposed on Americans--a mistaken policy that treats free 
     contact between American and Cuban societies as a detriment 
     rather than an opportunity. ``If we have a million Americans 
     walking on the streets of Havana, you will have something 
     like the pope's visit multiplied by 10,'' independent 
     journalist Manuel David Orrio told the Chicago Tribune in 
     1999. A Havana clergyman told me last month that visiting 
     Americans ``would permeate this place with the idea of a free 
     society.''
       Like other international travelers, Americans' spending 
     would boost Cubans' earnings in hotels and restaurants and 
     expand Cuba's incipient private sector. An influx of U.S. 
     travelers would immediately create a shortage of lodging that 
     would be filled partially by Cubans who legally rent rooms in 
     their homes. Demand for the services of artisans, taxis and 
     private restaurants would also increase, adding to the 
     disposable income that sustains other entrepreneurs, from 
     carpenters and repairmen to food vendors and tutors.
       As this sector, now 150,000 strong, gains income and 
     expands, demand would increase for the freely priced, 
     privately sold produce in Cuba's 300 farmers markets, 
     benefitting farmers across Cuba who have no contact with 
     tourists. Americans would experience ``the interface between 
     the entrepreneurial folks'' that President Bush lauds as a 
     virtue of open trade with communist China, to say nothing of 
     the value of their personal contact with Cubans. This may be 
     why a Florida International University poll shows a slim 
     majority of Cuban-Americans, and three fourths of the most 
     recent Cuban immigrants, supporting an end to the travel ban.
       A policy opening of this type would leave the trade embargo 
     largely intact for future review, and it would do nothing to 
     diminish America's stark opposition to Cuban human rights 
     practices. However, it would increase concrete support to the 
     Cuban people, and it would spur the development of free-
     market activity in the post-Castro Cuba that is now taking 
     shape.
                                 ______