[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that our Cuba policy was outdated and needed fundamental change.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.
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