Cuba Impasse Ended; House Will Vote on USDA Funding Bill

June 28, 2000

House GOP leaders have reached a compromise to relax U.S. sanctions on Cuba, allowing food and medicine sales but no private or goverment financing on food sales. That ends five weeks of negotiations among Republicans to allow a vote to exempt food and medicine sales from unilateral U.S. embargoes. It is also expected to clear the way for House consideration of the 2001 agriculture appropriations bill, probably later today.

Iran, Libya, Sudan and North Korea also would be affected by the partial lifting of sanctions, but Cuba is considered the major beneficiary. If approved by Congress, it would be a significant change, politically and economically, in U.S. sanctions imposed in the early 1960s.

Cuba would face greater restrictions on financing than the other nations, which would be denied U.S. government credit but could seek private U.S. financing. The ban on U.S. financing for food sales to Cuba reflected the sensitivity of dealing with the Communist island 90 miles from Florida.

REUTERS reported that the landmark legislation could be approved by the House yet this week. House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a long-standing opponent of any measures to normalise trade with Cuba, conceded that supporters of the measure had enough votes to pass it. Lawmakers may attached it to a huge military construction bill that is scheduled for a vote this week on the House floor, the Texas Republican said.

"We are working with the (military construction bill) appropriators to see if they can put that there. It is our hope that is what will happen," Armey said. "That way we will carry it out of here -- definitively carry it out -- this week."

If that tactic does not work, the Cuban embargo legislation would be returned to the agriculture funding bill, he said. House sources say that bill will come up for floor action Wednesday, assuming the House Rules Committee approves procedures to govern how it could be debated and amended.

The Senate has already voted in the past two years to ease the embargo, but its approval meant little without House action.

Where Cuba was concerned, however, the moves in the House apparently meant little. The initiative was "symbolic" and left existing U.S. sanctions mostly intact, REUTERS reported from Havana.

Cuban government commentators claimed the reported agreement in Congress to ease the 38-year-old U.S. economic embargo against Cuba as a victory for the communist-ruled island's attitude of stubborn resistance to U.S. hostility.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro, 73, now in his fourth decade in power, took pains in earlier public statements to stress that the move by Congress, while "important" and "necessary," still leaves intact the bulk of the embargo legislation against Cuba. This includes restrictions on financing and transportation links and on Cuban commercial sales to the United States.

Analysts said they expected the veteran Cuban leader to try to extract as much political advantage as possible from the limited U.S. initiative. They predicted he would seek to use the chink in the embargo opened by food and and medicine sales as a point of leverage with which to chip away at the remaining layers of U.S. sanctions against the Caribbean island.