The White House is stepping up efforts to squeeze Haiti's pro-military, wealthy elites, cutting off their access to visiting and shopping in the USA.
On Wednesday the Clinton administration revoked most non-immigrant visas held by Haitians, needed to travel to or reside temporarily in the USA.
Meanwhile, the rapidly growing wave of Haitian boat people has forced a fallback to an option the administration had hoped to avoid: reopening a shelter at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in southeastern Cuba.
U.S. officials scrambled Wednesday to set up tent cities at Guantanamo, as the Coast Guard began delivering hundreds of people to the base. It handled more than 12,500 Haitians in the last year of the Bush administration.
The visa ban, says White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers, "demonstrates in no uncertain terms that there is a real cost to Haitians' continued support of the military and its illegal government."
But it's largely symbolic. Commercial air traffic between Haiti and the USA was cut off last week.
One effect: Rich Haitians will have to go elsewhere to shop; Paris, for instance. "That would be one option. Coming to Miami would not," says Myers.
But visa-holding Haitians now in the USA have little to fear. Myers says the government won't go looking for them.
"If they leave, they cannot come back," she says.
Willliam Gray, Clinton's adviser on Haiti, rejected suggestions Washington didn't expect the sudden increase in boat people, about 3,300 in just six days.
He says the reason for the surge is the "deteriorating situation" under Haiti's military rulers, not Clinton's sanctions or his liberalized refugee policy.
"We were not surprised," says Gray. "When you have an increase in human rights violations, obviously you have an increase in people with justified claims for asylum."
Officials say Guantanamo is intended to be a temporary refugee processing center. It will ease the burden on the Navy hospital ship Comfort, anchored off Jamaica, until alternate centers open in July on the Turks and Caicos Islands and other Caribbean countries.
Guantanamo was a troubled haven for refugees during the Bush administration, which was sued by human rights advocates critical of the crowded and unsanitary living conditions.
Bush shut down the camps and ordered the Coast Guard to intercept and repatriate Haitians without asylum hearings. During his 1992 campaign, Clinton attacked Bush's policy as inhumane, then adopted it himself once he took office. Clinton abandoned it in May, allowing Haitians asylum appeals, after pressure from Haitian advocates.
