Posted on 05/10/2004 1:16:18 PM PDT by SmithPatterson
Cuba moves are called 'too little, too late' Monday, May 10, 2004 Journal staff and wire report Newhouse News Service A proposal to tighten restrictions against visiting relatives in Cuba has drawn criticism from Union City residents, who say U.S. efforts should be aimed at Fidel Castro, not the people who are suffering under his regime.
U.S. Rep. Robert Menendez, D-Hoboken, denounced the moves as political posturing in an attempt to secure more Florida votes in the upcoming November election. Florida is home to the nation's largest community of Cuban exiles, many of whom support a strengthening of the U.S. economic embargo.
Menendez, an anti-Castro hard-liner, called President Bush's measures "too little, too late."
"Today, the Bush White House has come to the realization that this fall's presidential election will, once again, be played out in the state of Florida," Menendez said in a written statement released Thursday, the same day Bush announced his proposal. "I am saddened that, once again, this president is playing election-year politics with the lives of the Cuban people."
The plan would cut the number of legal visits Cuban-Americans can make to the island from one a year to one every three years, thereby reducing the amount of money going into Cuba, and would set a $50-per-day limit on the amount of money family members can spend during their visits to Cuba, down from the current limit of $164 per day. Remittances also will be restricted to immediate family members.
Several Cuban-Americans interviewed in Union City, historically the nation's second-largest Cuban enclave, bristled at those two measures.
Jose Garcia, a Bronx resident who visits his aunts and cousins in Cuba once a year, had traveled to a Union City travel agency to inquire about a license that would enable him to make the trip more often. Bush's measures would make Garcia's plans impossible.
"I really don't have any family here, they're all in Cuba," said Garcia, who was born in the United States to parents who fled Cuba following the Communist revolution. "That doesn't affect Castro. That just affects the people of the country. Castro's not starving. His people are starving."
Bush said the tougher restrictions against trips and remittances are necessary components of the plan.
"It is a strategy that will prevent the regime from exploiting hard currency of tourists and of remittances to Cubans to prop up their repressive regime," Bush said. "It is a strategy that says we're not waiting for the day of Cuban freedom, we are working for the day of freedom in Cuba."
The plan also includes a series of measures designed to empower dissident groups, including the deployment of aircraft equipped with broadcasting equipment to overcome the Cuban government's jamming of Miami-based Radio Marti and TV, and $36 million in aid to Cuban pro-democracy dissident groups and the families of imprisoned activists.
The Bush's proposal is also drawing fire from members of his own party, where growing numbers of elected officials now support softening the 44-year-old embargo and lifting the restrictions that prevent most U.S. citizens from traveling to Cuba.
"The mission of TV and Radio Marti is to expose ordinary Cubans to democratic ideals and independent news, and they have great potential to do that," said Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican. "However, if we're really serious about letting Cubans hear a voice other than Castro's, why not let Americans travel there? After all, Castro can't scramble a first-hand conversation."
Bush announced the new measures after receiving a 500-page report by the Commission for Assistance for a Free Cuba, which he formed to come up with ideas to increase pressure on the Castro regime.
Commission members had been considering harsher measures that would have outlawed or severely reduced the amount of money Americans can send to relatives in Cuba. Bush's plan keeps in place the $1,200-a-year cap on remittances to immediate family members.
"The Bush administration did the right thing in staying away from that," said Maria Werlau, former Northeast regional director of the powerful anti-Castro group Cuban American National Foundation.
Werlau praised other aspects of the plan, including a crackdown on educational tour groups that serve as a vehicle for illicit tourism.
"It certainly weakens the possibility of Castro's succession, which is key at this point," she said.
On Friday, a day after the commission's recommendations were released, Castro's government ridiculed them as a "maniacal."
The government statement, published by the Communist Party daily Granma, said that if the recommendations were carried out, they would be "a violation of the rights of citizens of Cuban origin in the United States" by restricting their ability to visit and aid family members.
While Cuba has recently changed rules to make family visits easier, the Cuban report said, "the government of the United States is multiplying obstacles" by reducing the number of family visits. It also called the lowered amount of money that visitors can spend "a new and arbitrary discrimination against the Cuban community in the United States."
Arriving on a flight from Miami at Havana's international airport, Gladys Ruiz and her relatives embraced in reunion, weeping as they kissed one another repeatedly.
"I have my children here. I can't wait three years," she said.
"Politics shouldn't be mixed with families," said Carmen Brito, a 56-year-old Cuban waiting at the airport to greet her 77-year-old mother from Miami.
With aging parents, "how am I going to wait so much time?" she asked.
staff writer Brian Donohue and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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