But a top communist government official foresaw continued efforts on Capitol Hill
                 to ease Cold War-era restrictions on trade and travel to Cuba against Bush's
                 policies.

                 The president of the National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, said it was "interesting"
                 that the Senate Appropriations Committee had voted unanimously to lift the
                 four-decade-old travel curbs on Tuesday, despite Bush's vow to veto any easing of
                 the embargo.

                 The House of Representatives is prepared to follow suit and vote next week on its
                 version of a Treasury funding bill that would include lifting the Cuban travel ban for
                 the third year in a row.

                 "They are telling us that this battle will continue," Alarcon told Cuba's official news
                 agency, Prensa Latina.

                 Alarcon said he did not expect the current proposals to become law "due to the veto
                 announced by the Republican president."

                 Backed by exiled opponents of Cuban President Fidel Castro in Florida, Bush
                 vowed in May to maintain the sanctions until Cuba's one-party state allowed
                 democratic reforms, including multi-party elections.

                 A coalition of big business, religious and other groups in the United States have
                 lobbied with increasing success for the ending of the trade embargo and the
                 restrictions travel to Cuba by Americans.

                 Currently, U.S. citizens must get a license from the Treasury Department to travel
                 to Cuba, and those are generally limited to Cuban-Americans visiting relatives and
                 trips by journalists, academics, artists and humanitarian groups.

                 Lifting the travel ban would be a boon to Cuba's stagnant tourism industry, the
                 island's main source of hard currency. The drop in global tourism since the
                 September 11 terror attacks in the United States has left Cuban hotels virtually
                 empty.

                 Attractions for tourists

                 Foreign travel agents in Havana believe millions of Americans would travel to the
                 island if they were allowed to, drawn by th e colonial architecture of Havana, a city
                 frozen in time where old American cars still fill the streets and novelist Ernest
                 Hemingway once wrote and fished.

                 The travel agents, however, expect U.S. tourism to Cuba to be a one-trip business,
                 with travelers preferring cheaper resorts on other Caribbean islands with more
                 amenities and better services.

                 Supporters of the U.S. sanctions, mainly Cuban exiles concentrated in Miami,
                 staunchly oppose any easing of the embargo and travel ban, saying it would serve
                 to prop up Castro, in power since a 1959 revolution.

                 Proponents of ending the travel ban say it infringes on U.S. citizens' constitutional
                 rights to travel freely and has failed to weaken Castro's grip on the island nation,
                 despite the economic crisis it has suffered since the collapse of the Soviet Union
                 more than a decade ago.

                 In an unrelated move on Tuesday, Bush again suspended for six months a law
                 allowing Americans to sue foreign companies using Cuban property confiscated
                 after the 1959 revolution.

                 Extending the suspension allows the United States to avoid potential disputes with
                 European Union nations whose firms have investments in Cuba. Bush first extended
                 the provision last July, following the lead of former President Bill Clinton, who
                 suspended the controversial provisions 10 times in a row.

                 Alarcon said Bush was "ignorant, but not crazy," adding that enforcement of Title
                 III of the so-called Helms-Burton law that tightened the U.S. embargo in 1996
                 would lead to "chaos" in the courts.

                    Copyright 2002 Reuters.