By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer

Brushing aside veto threats from the White House, the Senate joined the House yesterday in voting to end the United States' long-standing restrictions on travel to Cuba.

With 19 Republicans breaking ranks with the Bush administration, the Senate voted 59 to 36 to bar use of government funds to enforce the restrictions as part of a $90 billion spending bill for the Treasury Department and other agencies. The House passed a virtually identical proposal last month.

The administration recently stepped up efforts to isolate the government of Fidel Castro and crack down on Americans traveling to Cuba, and has threatened to veto the entire bill unless the travel provisions are dropped. After the Senate vote, the White House said it "believes that it is essential to maintain sanctions and travel restrictions to deny economic resources to the brutal Castro regime."

But opponents of the restrictions, many of whom represent states that want to sell agricultural and other products to Cuba, said the constraints hurt the United States more than Cuba and help Castro by enabling him to blame the United States for his country's problems.

"It's not constructive at all to try to slap around Fidel Castro by imposing limits on the American people's right to travel," Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) said.

Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), who co-sponsored the proposal with Dorgan, said the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control should be able to concentrate on terrorism and drug trafficking rather than having to worry about American tourists in Cuba.

Dorgan accused the administration of supporting the continuation of the travel curbs to court the Cuban American vote in Florida, a key state in next year's presidential election.

Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) supported continuing the travel restrictions. "Why should we now open up travel to Cuba to give additional cash flow to the Castro regime?" he asked.

Both houses previously passed proposals to drop the travel restrictions, but Republican leaders scrapped the provisions in a House-Senate conference on the grounds that they were significantly different. So Dorgan and his allies used the House language in their version this year, which Dorgan said should make it more difficult to be stripped out in the conference committee.

An estimated 160,000 Americans, many of them with relatives in Cuba, traveled legally to Cuba last year under exceptions to the travel restrictions, but thousands more are believed to have gone illegally. Dorgan said U.S. farm groups sold nearly $100 million worth of products in Cuba last year but have been denied licenses to travel there this year.

© 2003