Word: havana
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When the U.S. embargo on Cuba finally goes, no one will miss it as much as Fidel Castro. That much was clear Wednesday when the Cuban strongman led a reported 800,000 people in a protest march along Havana's oceanfront to denounce Washington's latest adjustments to the 38-year embargo. Now that little Elian Gonzalez is back at school, the embargo remains the most useful tool in Castro's ideological shed: It provides both an all-purpose excuse for the privations suffered by his people since the collapse of Cuban socialism's Soviet patron, and a nationalist rallying...
...have looked a little incongruous, perhaps, that the Cuban leader donned his sneakers and led the equivalent of half of Havana's population on a protest march the very day the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of legislation ostensibly relaxing the embargo. But a closer look at the measures contained in an agriculture spending bill makes clear that the easing of the embargo on imports of food and medicine is more symbolic than practical - Cuba would still be denied the credit facilities routinely used by countries trading with the U.S., rendering any new purchases extremely unlikely - and restrictions...
...prepared to defend its soundness as a policy, while most of the wise men of Republican administrations past assembled as foreign policy advisers by Governor Bush have called for a review of the embargo. The Clinton administration's previous moves toward relaxing the embargo were torpedoed in 1996 by Havana's shooting down of two civilian aircraft flown by anti-Castro exiles who'd dropped pamphlets on the island. That prompted President Clinton to sign the Helms-Burton Act, which made the embargo an act of Congress rather than simply an executive order. But once electoral concerns recede next year...
...Havana will, no doubt, fume about how the Cuban Adjustment Act - which grants asylum to any Cubans who manage to reach U.S. shores, but sends home those intercepted at sea - encourages people to risk their lives. Campaigning against the act has become the centerpiece of Fidel Castro's domestic propaganda efforts in the wake of the Elian Gonzalez case, but that doesn't mean Havana will use Thursday's previously scheduled immigration talks with U.S. officials in Washington to threaten, once again, to open the spigots. (The current arrangement was negotiated between the two governments, which have no official diplomatic...
...Following the Elian Gonzalez debacle, Washington will be inclined to quietly process the latest arrivals and let the matter rest. And Havana, too, may be reluctant to turn the case into another confrontation. If, as it now appears, this is simply a case of a group of consenting adults and their children trying to leave Cuba, then it's a no-brainer in the eyes of the U.S. public. And making a fuss might undo the gains Havana made in U.S. public opinion during the Elian showdown. In other words, don't expect to see this case remain...