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US-CUBA: NGOs Hail Congressional Moves to
Ease Embargo
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON (IPS) - Leading advocates for
lifting the nearly 50-year-old U.S. trade
embargo against Cuba are hailing Congress's
approval Tuesday of a general appropriations
bill that eases - albeit in a mostly
symbolic way - several restrictions on
travel and sales to the Caribbean nation.
The bill, which was signed by President
Barack Obama Wednesday, denies funding to
the U.S. Treasury Department to enforce two
restrictions, including travel to Cuba by
Cuban-Americans, imposed by former President
George W. Bush.
The bill also provides for a general license
for travel by U.S. companies and individuals
to Cuba for the purpose of selling U.S.
agricultural and medical goods.
A Bush-imposed regulation had required that
businesses wishing to sell their products in
Cuba had to apply for a specific license to
go there on a case-by-case basis, a
cumbersome and sometimes protracted process
that discouraged many companies from going
through the process.
"For the first time in almost a decade,
Congress is acting to loosen the Cuba
embargo and send these modest reforms to a
president who has promised to change the
policy rather than issue veto threats or
keep things as they are," asserted a joint
statement by several groups, including the
Centre for Democracy in the Americas (CDA)
and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
"When we have a Congress and a president
acting to make sensible changes in Cuba
policy, this indicates to us that the ground
has shifted and that there is momentum
behind the efforts to make broader and more
lasting changes in policy," said the groups,
which also included the U.S.-Cuba Policy
Initiative of the New America Foundation (NAF)
and the Latin America Working Group here.
In a victory for peace advocates, the
funding measure, called an omnibus
appropriations bill, also included a
provision that makes permanent what had been
a provisional ban on nearly all cluster-bomb
exports from the United States, bringing
Washington one step closer toward compliance
with a treaty signed by nearly 100 nations
in December that would ban cluster munitions
altogether.
The cluster-bomb provision states that
U.S.-made cluster munitions can be exported
only if less than one percent of their
sub-munitions are duds and if the recipient
country formally agrees not to use the
weapon "where civilians are known to be
present."
U.S.-origin cluster bombs were most recently
used by Israel in its 2006 war with
Hezbollah in Lebanon where dud rates were
reportedly as high as 40 percent, and
hundreds of civilians and de-miners have
since been killed or maimed by unexploded
munitions, according to the U.S. Campaign to
Ban Landmines (USCBL).
The easing of the Cuba embargo comes a month
before Obama's much-anticipated attendance
at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad
where he will meet all of the hemisphere's
leaders except Cuban President Raul Castro.
Before he travels to the Summit, Obama is
widely expected to follow through on
campaign promises to use his executive
authority to lift two of the most
controversial measures imposed by Bush,
which limited the freedom of Cuban-Americans
to visit their families in Cuba to once
every three years, and their ability to send
remittances to their families on the island.
Anti-embargo activists, which not only
include groups focused primarily on Cuba,
but also major U.S. business associations,
including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and
human rights groups, such as Amnesty
International, hope that he will go further
than that, possibly by broadening the
authority of the Treasury Department to
issue general licenses for a wider range of
travel to Cuba, including educational and
cultural travel.
While hard-line anti-Castro forces based
primarily in southern Florida and New
Jersey, still strongly oppose any easing of
the embargo, there appears to be a growing
consensus in Washington – signaled in part
by the approval of the omnibus bill in
favour of moving toward normalisation, not
only as a means to encourage reform by the
Communist government, but also to remove an
impediment to closer ties with the rest of
Latin America, virtually all of which have
urged Washington to lift the embargo.
On Tuesday, for example, the Inter-American
Dialogue (IAD), a hemispheric think tank
based in Washington, called U.S. efforts to
isolate and sanction Cuba "an anachronism
that serves mainly to isolate the United
States from the rest of the hemisphere."
"Nothing would better demonstrate the new
administration's intention to pursue a fresh
approach to Latin America than making a
quick start to dismantle the web of
restrictions that the United States has
imposed on Cuba," said IAD, which is
co-chaired by former U.S. Trade
Representative Carla Hills and former
Chilean President Ricardo Lagos. "A policy
shift on Cuba, which carries great symbolic
weight in the region, would be a powerful
signal that Washington will be more
responsive to Latin America views."
While the IAD report was directed primarily
at Obama, majorities in Congress supported
increased ties with Havana over the past
eight years but were consistently thwarted
by Bush's veto threats.
It is in that context that Congress approved
the three Cuba-related provisions.
Two of the three are mainly symbolic. Thus,
Cuban-Americans will still be permitted to
visit their families once every three years,
but the Treasury Department, which is
charged with enforcing the embargo, will not
be permitted to prosecute those who wish to
travel more often, because no funds will be
appropriated for that purpose.
Similarly, U.S. food and medical companies
that export goods to Cuba will still be
required under law to receive payment in
cash before their shipments leave U.S.
ports. But, under the new provision,
Treasury will not be able to prosecute
companies that receive cash on actual
delivery.
The third provision - permitting Treasury to
issue a general license for agricultural and
medical businesses wishing to export goods
to Cuba rather than forcing companies to
approve requests on a case-by-case basis -
does mark a real change in the underlying
law, according to Jake Colvin, vice
president of the National Foreign Trade
Council (NFTC), an association of major U.S.
multinational corporations which strongly
supports lifting the embargo.
"This will make travel to Cuba for a whole
class of businesspeople much easier, and it
will take the burden off Treasury to go
through these applications so it can focus
more on tracking al Qaeda and other more
serious transactions," he told IPS.
All of the anti-embargo groups, including
the NFTC's Colvin, said the fact that
Congress took the first step toward easing
the embargo should make it easier for Obama
himself to go beyond his campaign promises
to ease restrictions on Cuban-American
travel and remittances.
"This debate shows how significantly the
U.S. political climate has changed on Cuba,"
said Sarah Stephens, CDA's director. "I
believe there is momentum in Congress to
make travel available for all, but the
president need not wait for legislation to
seize the initiative," she said.
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