Global Policy Forum

By Tim Golden

The Clinton administration is quietly moving to expand contacts between the United States and Cuba, pressing a modest opening that largely sidesteps President Fidel Castro's government.

With a series of small steps -- some announced earlier this year and others now being prepared -- the administration is mainly seeking to ease the hardships of the Cuban people and to allow certain Americans to visit Cuba, set up offices there and send money, food and medicine more freely. In coming weeks, officials said, they will lift more restrictions on money transfers and travel and announce the start of direct charter flights between Havana and the New York metropolitan region and Los Angeles, in addition to those that now depart and land at Miami.

The moves have included a tentative new approach to the Cuban government. On June 21 in Havana, U.S. and Cuban officials agreed to begin working more closely to combat a sharp rise in drug trafficking in and around the island, and they proposed other measures that American officials said could lead to greater cooperation. The initiative falls well within the limits on American policy that were set in 1992 and 1996 by laws that stiffened the 37-year-old economic embargo on the island. Some of the steps now being taken were postponed in the outcry after Cuban fighters shot down two civilian planes in 1996, killing four Cuban-Americans who had planned to fly over Havana and leading to the 1996 law.

But the laws leave the White House considerable authority to widen American contacts with Cuba, and officials say they are resolved to make that happen. "There is a conscious decision in this administration to do what needs to be done," a senior official said. Referring to Cuban-American opponents of Castro's government, he added, "This is a policy that has been held hostage to interest groups for way too long."

Some officials said the administration was already being pulled on Cuba policy between the legacy of President Clinton and the political aspirations of Vice President Al Gore. Clinton is said by aides to see Washington's approach to Cuba as archaic and ineffective. Gore is described as highly aware of the considerable influence that Cuban-American voters may have in two pivotal states, Florida and New Jersey.

Yet other officials say however modest the recent measures, the shift is particularly significant because it reflects a widespread view in the administration that the domestic politics of dealing with Cuba are changing in fundamental ways.

A decade after the Cold War's end, administration officials say they see the strength of conservative Cuban-American groups waning, while opposition to the embargo continues to grow among business people, farmers, religious groups and younger Cuban-Americans.

After years of waiting for some political opening in Cuba, American officials say, they are now determined to go forward, even if Castro responds by cracking down on dissent, as he did soon after Washington announced measures in January to increase contact between the two countries. The Cuban response has even encouraged some American proponents of a hard-line policy to say that the so-called people-to-people initiative might help destabilize the Communist government by empowering the few dissidents on the island.

For its part, the administration sees the approach as a means of undercutting Cuba's argument that it is under siege by the United States. The new direction is also widely seen as a way to present a kinder American face to ordinary Cubans and, perhaps, to build a modicum of trust with younger Cuban officials who will become more important after the 72-year-old Castro passes from power.

The administration's latest actions on Cuba recall an even more low-key White House effort in late 1995 and early 1996. Officials said that initiative, which focused more directly on the Cuban government, was approved by Clinton and managed by Sandy Berger, deputy national security adviser at the time. It started with a relaxation of travel and other restrictions in October 1995. But according to current and former officials, the administration also choreographed a series of possible steps to ease American sanctions if Cuba continued to open up its economy and to promote a more cooperative relationship with the Cuban government. "We were trying to open the door -- to push it open if necessary -- and make it clear to the Cuban government that if they walked through that door, nothing bad would happen to them," one former official involved in the planning said.

Then as now, officials said, collaboration in antinarcotics efforts was high on the agenda. In meetings with Cuban officials, U.S. officials raised the possibility of American law-enforcement training for Cuban police and border-guard officials, as well as the stationing of a representative of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Havana, officials said. "Narcotics was going to be a vehicle to get to other things," another former official involved in that initiative said. "The real question was what the next step would be."

Other proposals included encouraging American nongovernmental groups like environmental and human rights advocates to work in Cuba, some collaboration with the Cuban government on environmental issues and an exploration of how to initiate contacts abroad between military officers of the two countries.

Such efforts slammed to an abrupt halt in February 1996 when the civilian planes were shot down. The next month, Congress passed the Helms-Burton law, codifying the embargo and adding sanctions. Clinton signed the legislation over the advice of some senior aides and that November came surprisingly close to winning a majority of the Cuban-American vote in Dade County, Fla.

In recent months, the Treasury Department has begun to simplify the cumbersome procedures for travel to Cuba by Americans like researchers and athletes, aid workers and freelance journalists. Similar consideration is most likely to be extended soon to others like students, artists and representatives of religious groups. In March, the administration moved to streamline the sale and donation of medicines to Cuba, and next month, a Florida pharmaceutical company is to start shipping medicines to Cubans for benefactors in the United States.

Under federal rules that will take effect this month, Cuban emigres and others will be able to send money to Cubans by Western Union, reducing the cost of transfers that have been handled by travel agencies and other small businesses. Americans can now send up to $300 to the island every three months, as long as the money does not go to senior government or Communist Party officials.

How much advantage Americans will take of the new rules remains to be seen. A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, Maria Ibanez, said travel to Cuba had steadily increased since the new regulations were issued in May. The expected addition of direct charter flights from New York and Los Angeles is intended to accommodate that rise.

Since baseball games in the spring between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban national team, the administration has offered proposals for other sports events. Those plans have been set back, however, by differences over how to avoid generating revenue for the Cuban government, a State Department official said.

Over the past years, FBI counterterrorism officials have traveled to Havana to discuss the bombings of tourist hotels there, and weather experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have met Cuban officials to discuss sharing information on hurricanes. But the administration move last month to explore a more cooperative antidrug relationship with the Cuban government has run into stronger opposition, mainly from a few members of Congress, who say the Cuban authorities are involved in the drug trade.

Administration officials who have read a recent Central Intelligence Agency assessment of Cuba's role said it concluded, to the contrary, that although traffickers in the Caribbean might have bought the complicity of low-level Cuban officials, there was no evidence of high-level drug corruption.

American officials also cite a series of incidents in recent years in which Cuban officials helped track down drug shipments, as well as one in which they even testified in a federal drug-smuggling case in the United States.

The United States and Cuba have communicated for some time by fax about suspicious boats and planes around the island. At the meetings on June 21 in Havana, Cuban officials told State Department and Coast Guard representatives that they would speed up communications by using telephones and radios. Cuba will not allow American ships to pursue suspected drug boats into Cuban waters, but will consider letting the Coast Guard station a drug-interdiction specialist at the American diplomatic mission in Havana and having Coast Guard experts join Cubans in searching large ships, administration officials said.

Although some officials said the administration's new approach was gaining momentum, others predicted that it would increasingly be filtered through Gore's presidential campaign. Gore, the officials said, has taken a relatively hard line on Cuban policy in the past, playing a prominent role in the decision to suspend charter flights in 1994. "If the administration wants to help Gore, they're not going to push beyond the parameter of what they're doing now," said Rep. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., who also credited Gore with helping to defeat a proposal for a bipartisan commission to reassess Cuba policy. "If they push the envelope much further," Menendez said, "I think you'll see more negative reaction." A spokesman for Gore, Tom Rosshirt, said the vice president supported a policy of building contacts with the Cuban people while maintaining economic pressure on the government. Rosshirt declined to comment on specific advice that Gore has given Clinton on Cuba.

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