By JOE DAVIDSON

       HAVANA--One thing becomes clear while walking through Old Havana. The Cuban embargo serves to isolate U.S. foreign policy much more than it does Fidel Castro. English tour groups on one corner and German speakers just steps away make the place bustle even during the off season.
       The number of U.S. politicians, businesspeople and journalists who travel to Cuba demonstrates the importance of the island and the impotence of the policy. Certainly, as a means of barring trade beneficial to both sides, the sanctions have been a success. As a means of alleviating Castro's repressive policies and bringing needed political and economic change to Cuba, the embargo is a clear failure.
       Not only that, it's counterproductive. With genuineness or not, government officials here say the embargo is the reason there is no press freedom in Cuba. Human rights activists complain that whenever Washington turns the screws on Havana, Cuba becomes even more oppressive.
       "With the present policy in the U.S. it would be practically impossible to press ahead to a more democratic society," dissident Manuel Cuesta Morua told a small group of American reporters in Havana as an uninvited hotel security officer sat nearby taking notes.
       Despite its obvious failing as a political strategy, Republican and Democratic administrations alike cling to the embargo as if it works. It's too much to expect prudence to abruptly take charge of Washington's Cuban policy. There are, however, politically realistic, albeit limited, steps the White House and Congress can take to set that policy on a more positive course.
       Bush made the right decision Monday when he waived certain Helms-Burton Act provisions that would tighten sanctions against Cuba. The measure would have allowed U.S. citizens whose property was seized in Cuba after Castro took power to take legal action in U.S. courts against third countries that do business in Cuba using this property. The waiver, unfortunately, simply maintains the status quo and does little to promote a more sensible Cuba policy.
       Instead of enforcing other measures "to the fullest extent with a view toward preventing unlicensed and excessive travel," as Bush called for last week, the administration should support elimination of all travel restrictions to Cuba. That's one aim of legislation sponsored by Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate's subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs.
       That bill also would facilitate the sale of food and medicine to Cuba by removing financing constraints. The measure would lift restrictions on the ability of ships carrying goods to Cuba to enter U.S. waters. Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), a co-sponsor of the bill, said it would help move "our country toward a policy that benefits the Cuban people instead of harming them."
       Bush certainly should reconsider his plan to fund dissidents in Cuba. The main opposition forces there don't want the money because it would give Castro's government even more ammunition to brand them as Washington stooges.
       Legislation offered by Sens. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) would provide $100 million to island dissidents.
       Even without a vote on the legislation, "it's already done tremendous harm," Cuba's leading dissident, Elizardo Sanchez, said in Washington last week. "Cuba already says it proves dissidents are paid U.S. agents."
       Dennis Hays, executive vice president of the Cuban American National Foundation, the main anti-Castro lobby group in the U.S., says other dissidents would take the money. "We're in favor of anything that gets aid directly to the Cuban people," he said, "but we are very much opposed to giving aid to the Cuban government."
       One form of aid that gets to no one is TV Marti, the U.S. television broadcast from Miami to Cuba. Cuba has so thoroughly jammed the signal that hardly anyone on the island has ever seen its programs. Eliminating TV Marti would be an easy way to symbolically show goodwill while saving the millions that have been wasted on it.
       President Bush likes to say that "the sanctions the United States enforces against the Castro regime are not just a policy tool but a moral statement." A far more forceful moral statement would be a set of policies that really would encourage democracy and human rights in Cuba.
       The 40-year embargo does not.
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  Joe Davidson Is a Commentator on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." E-mail: Joetdavidson@hotmail.com

 Copyright 2001