Word: rafting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With members itching to hit the campaign trail, Congress slogged through a raft of last-minute legislative business, including a pile of spending bills, in order to adjourn as quickly as possible. The House approved and sent to the Senate for its expected approval a stringent ban on gifts from lobbyists. The Senate, unable to overcome bitter partisan differences, walked away from campaign-reform legislation but agreed to go back for a post-election lame- duck session in order to vote on global-trade legislation...
...when Bill Clinton sat down with his top advisers last week to figure out what to do with the thousands of Cuban refugees floating toward Florida on every kind of makeshift raft they could tie together, there seemed no other choice. The President had already insisted he would not let the boat people into the U.S. proper -- that was politically unacceptable -- but the refugee flow swelled rather than ebbed. Blockade the island? Not really; that would be an act of war. Send the refugees back to Castro? Too heartless, and besides, he would not take them...
...past, and he has been disappointed that a Democratic Administration in Washington has not proved more receptive to dealing with him. So Castro let it be known that his police would no longer arrest or even try to stop Cubans attempting to flee by makeshift boat or raft. Ergo, two problems solved at once: angry Cubans were distracted from turning their despair against Fidel, and he certainly got Washington's attention...
...child, and by the simplicity of Cuban life, as well as by its tension and poverty. Many of his boyhood friends confided that "as soon as they got the chance they'd be out of there." He believes them: two cousins have arrived in the U.S. by raft in the past five years...
...three days the weather achieved what Clinton could not, stemming the tide of rafters. On the beach at Guanabo, east of Havana, Saturday night's forecast is for 15-ft. waves and more rain. The balseros along the shore use their time to work on their rafts, dream, complain. Jorge Luis, 36, introduces his raft's crew. "Just because we're discontented, we're considered antisocial," he says. "But in fact we're all professionals. Cuba is like a prison these days. You work one month to eat one day. You . . . " And then he pauses and smiles, surveying one raft...