Anti-Castro Activists Hope Bush Will Boost Grants, Which Critics Call Ineffective

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer

When Czech legislator Ivan Pilip traveled to Cuba in January, he brought some medicine, a few boxes of pencils, a laptop computer and a list of Cuban political
dissidents. His expenses were paid by Freedom House, an American pro-democracy group that recruited him to deliver the modest supplies to government
opponents and talk to Cubans about his own dissident experiences in the former Czechoslovakia.

Four days after Pilip arrived with Jan Bubenik, a former Czech student leader, they were thrown into Havana's Villa Marista prison, accused of participating in U.S.
government efforts to "promote internal subversion" and threatened with 20-year sentences.

The Czechs were released after a month of diplomatic negotiations and an orchestrated admission that they had violated Cuban law. Once they were safe at home in
Prague, international outrage erupted over Cuba's actions and its insistence that the U.S. government is lurking behind every criticism.

But the Freedom House money that financed Pilip's trip had, in fact, come from the U.S. government, part of an annual grant program that since 1997 has funded
efforts to support Cuban dissidents and prepare for a post-Castro transition. Freedom House has received $1.3 million. Other groups -- a number of them organized
by Cuban Americans committed to ending Cuban President Fidel Castro's regime -- have received similar grants, as have several universities and business and labor
groups.

Established under the 1996 Helms-Burton Act and administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), the program was minimally funded at $3
million or less each year under the Clinton administration, which also prohibited the transfer of any U.S. government cash to groups or individuals inside Cuba. Now,
proponents of a tougher line against Cuba are pressing the Bush administration to sharply increase the amount and scope of U.S. government assistance to the
internal Cuban opposition.

"What worked in Poland will work in Cuba," Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) said in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in January. Jorge Mas Santos, leader
of the Cuban American National Foundation, said President Bush "would do well to emulate the Reagan and Bush administrations' approach" to Communist-ruled
Poland and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, "supporting the democratic opposition and cultivating an emerging civil society with financial and other means of support."

Both Helms and Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a Cuban American, plan to introduce legislation calling for an expansion of aid to the internal opposition.

Critics of this approach argue that Cuba and 1980s Poland have little in common, and that the Cuba program has done little but fill the coffers of exile groups over
the past four years. "I have never seen any evidence at all that these things have any impact in Cuba," said Jorge Dominguez, the head of Harvard University's
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a Cuban American.

Some critics are more succinct. "This doesn't belong in AID at all," said a congressional aide whose boss strongly opposes the program. "It is basically a covert aid
program for Cuba. We don't even know who the final recipients are. The host government doesn't accept it. It's nuts."

Anti-Castro Cuban American activists and their allies in Congress are convinced that Bush not only shares their views on Cuba, but owes them his electoral victory in
Florida -- and, hence, the presidency. In return, they want him to use his executive powers to harden U.S. policy and hasten Castro's end.

In addition to the expanded aid program, they have called in public statements and private meetings with administration officials for tighter travel restrictions and a
reversal of the bilateral agreement under which Cuban migrants intercepted at sea are sent home. They advocate the implementation of U.S. sanctions, repeatedly
waived by President Bill Clinton, against certain foreign businesses that deal with Cuba, and stepped-up pressure on members of the U.N. Human Rights
Commission to support an anti-Castro resolution this month in Geneva.

During the presidential campaign, Bush and his foreign policy advisers confined their remarks to boilerplate support for what Bush called "the status quo" of no formal
diplomatic relations with Cuba and continuation of the embargo. When candidate Bush strayed from the script -- saying that he didn't think the United States should
"use food as a diplomatic weapon" -- a sharp letter from Diaz-Balart brought a quick self-correction at his next news conference.

Advocates of a tougher policy were disappointed at the choice of career diplomat John Maisto to handle Latin American affairs at the National Security Council. But
they are encouraged by word that the leading contender for assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs is Otto J. Reich, who worked in the Reagan
State Department. Cuba-born Reich is a Washington lobbyist who serves on the boards of Freedom House and at least one other AID grant recipient.

The new optimism follows a difficult year for the anti-Castro activists. The Clinton administration's success in returning 6-year-old shipwreck victim Elian Gonzalez to
Cuba left South Florida's Cuban American community demoralized and in disarray. Bills to ease the 40-year-old trade embargo and to lift travel restrictions won
large, bipartisan majorities in Congress before they were killed or severely watered down in conference by the Republican leadership.

Backers of the sanctions-easing efforts, including Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y.). have already submitted new legislation
advocating more normal ties, and are counting on a coalition of business and farm interests seeking trade with Cuba to propel them to victory again. They insist that
single-issue support for anti-Castro policies may not be as easy for Bush as the hard-liners think.

Even some supporters of a tougher Cuba policy question whether Bush has the political will or backing to accomplish it. "He won across the Farm Belt," said Rep.
Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), a Cuban American. "Is he going to tell all the agricultural people he's beholden to that Cuba's off the possibility of discussion? I hope so.
But obviously . . . they're going to say, 'Hey, you won this election because of us.' The flip side is the Cubans are going to say 'Hey, you won Florida because of us.' "

Switching their primary focus from the embargo to support of the aid program provides anti-Castro activists an opportunity "to talk about what we are for, not
against," Mas Santos of the Cuban American National Foundation said in a recent speech. Long a powerful political force in the Miami-based Cuban community, the
foundation does not receive government money.

According to AID, 22 grants totaling about $10 million have been distributed, many with the identical missions of providing literature on human rights and democracy
inside Cuba, the international distribution of information produced by dissidents, and assisting the families of Cuban political prisoners. CubaNet, a Miami-based
Internet site, publishes reports from independent journalists.

The International Republican Institute and universities have conducted U.S.-funded studies on transition planning. The University of Florida received $110,000 to
conduct opinion surveys among arriving Cuban immigrants about life and attitudes on the island. Other grantees try to persuade U.S. and international labor and
business groups to support their minuscule nongovernmental counterparts in Cuba.

The Institute for Democracy in Cuba, a coalition of 10 Miami-based groups that U.S. officials persuaded to unite as a grantee, received $1 million for a project that
included preparing lengthy videotape lectures on international political history, beginning with the ancient Greeks, to distribute inside Cuba.

The largest recipient, at $1.45 million, is the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba, which divides its time -- and its budget -- between privately funded
advocacy to maintain the embargo and AID-funded assistance to Cubans. The group relies on visitors to the island to distribute miniaturized Spanish-language
reprints of George Orwell's "Animal Farm," Czech President Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless" and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"We want the folks in Cuba to stand up to totalitarianism," said the group's president, Frank Calzon, a Cuban American who started the Cuba AID program at
Freedom House before founding his own group to receive grants.

Critics question whether the aid does any good in a country where organized opposition is small and weak, and whether it targets the right Cubans. "It presumes that
the U.S. government and its subcontractors have . . . the ability to identify who it is that matters in Cuba," said Dominguez. "The most interesting thing about Cuba is
that most of the [potential dissidents] who matter are working for the government and the Communist Party."

Pilip, the Czech lawmaker and former cabinet minister who was detained in Cuba, agreed in a telephone interview from Prague that there was "no direct measure of
concrete results." But he cited two reasons why he thinks the program is a good idea. Under his own country's Communist regime, he said, "it helped because I had a
chance to talk to people. . . . It helped us to keep in touch with something international, not to feel so psychologically isolated" even if the visitors didn't bring them
anything.

The other reason, he said, was the attitude of the Cuban authorities who interrogated him. "They are very much afraid of it. All the time they were repeating to me,
'Look, this is something organizations like Freedom House used to do in your country before the political changes and it was successful, it was terrible. But we will
not let them do the same in our country.' "

                                               © 2001