by Linda Robinson; Kenneth T. Walsh; Tim Zimmermann
In normal times, the 45-square-mile U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba's southeastern tip is home to 2,000 seamen who help train the U.S. Atlantic fleet. Once a quiet place with one stoplight and a McDonald's, "Gitmo," as sailors call it, is now jammed with 6,300 military personnel working around the clock to pitch tents and feed a flood of Cuban refugees plucked from the sea. Told to plan for 50,000 refugees, Seabees rushed to erect more tents on the golf course, and servicemen's families were evacuated to make more room for the arriving Cubans. By the end of last week, almost 35,000 refugees, including some 14,000 Haitians, were sheltered on the scrub-dotted base.
The Clinton administration's immediate priorities are stanching the ongoing Cuban exodus and figuring out what to do with the thousands who have already fled. But the desperate migrants being taken to Guantanamo Bay could signal the beginning of an ongoing crisis as Fidel Castro's Cuba continues its economic tumble amid growing political uncertainty. "There's a realization now that this could be areally big problem that would make Haiti look small by comparison," says one American official.
Yet while Clinton's aides lay a foundation for a possible invasion of Haiti, officials admit that the administration, paralyzed by competing political sensitivities, has no long-range strategy for easing Castro out of power peacefully or ensuring that his successors are democratic and market oriented. "I don't think anybody has figured that out," says a senior official. In the meantime, the administration's efforts to cope with the rising tide of Cuban refugees are running into trouble. At a hot, barren tent city on Guantanamo's rifle range, confusion and anger threaten to rise to the boiling point. Oswaldo Herrera traveled from Cienfuegos with his 3-year-old daughter to take a boat along with 16 neighbors, a boat they hoped would carry them to freedom and their relatives in the United States. Pointing to the concertina wire encircling the camp, he says indignantly: "We thought capitalist countries would give us refuge. But we are prisoners here!" Fulgencio Gonzalez Ruiz echoes him: "We did not risk our lives and go to the sea to come to a concentration camp!" A younger man in the same blue trunks he wore on his watery flight tries to calm the crowd, saying: "We are trying to relax to put up with the situation. But there will come a time when we will do whatever we have to to get out of here, just as we got out of Cuba."
The crisis pits strong anti-immigration sentiment nationwide -- and especially in the nation's four most populous states, California, New York, Texas and Florida -- against Cuban- Americans' desire to help their countrymen. Previously, Cuban refugees were automatically admitted to the United States, but on August 18, after the Castro government announced that all who wished to leave might do so, President Clinton ordered that Cubans be detained at Guantanamo.
Deja vu. Above all, the White House wants to avoid a repeat of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, in which 125,000 Cubans fled their homeland and caused a political disaster for President Jimmy Carter and for Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas. And there is a wider fear among Clinton advisers: that an influx of Cuban refugees in Florida would suggest to voters in other states that the president cannot control the nation's borders.
U.S. and Cuban officials sat down last week in New York to address the crisis. Administration officials hope that Castro will agree to use peaceful persuasion to stop the exodus in return for nearly a 10-fold increase -- to about 20,000 -- in the number of Cubans permitted to enter the United States each year. But the current crisis was precipitated in part by Castro's inability to control the outflow of unhappy Cubans without using violence, and the talks cannot resolve the problem of what to do with the thousands of Cubans already at Guantanamo.
Protesting Haitians have twice overrun the waist-high concertina wire encircling their areas. Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Williams, commander of the joint task force for refugee processing, worries that rioting could break out as the numbers of frustrated refugees mount. Additional camps in Panama or elsewhere in the region will be no more appealing.
Moreover, the current immigration crisis is just one symptom of a more fundamental and more volatile issue -- the economic crisis in Cuba. Bereft of the estimated $6 billion annual subsidy the former Soviet Union used to provide and battered by Castro's refusal to betray his revolution by adopting effective economic reforms, Cuba's economy and society are locked in a downward spiral that could end in chaos. "Storm Warnings for Cuba," a study by the Rand Corp. for the Defense Department, raises the specter of severe repression and hardship, perhaps even "widespread bloodshed and civil war on the island with increased chances of a [U.S.] military conflict with Cuba."
Castro would like the Clinton administration to help him avert collapse. A number of Cuba experts, congressmen and former U.S. officials say it is time to consider easing the 33-year-old U.S. economic embargo and talking to the Cuban leader in an attempt to promote an East European-style peaceful transition from hard-line communism to democracy and a market economy.
Trying to engineer a soft landing while waiting out the 67- year-old Castro, however, could expose the administration to intense political heat. Florida's Cuban-American lobby, which Clinton has been courting, argues vehemently for maintaining the tight economic squeeze on Cuba in an effort to speed Castro's fall. Lisandro Perez, who heads the Cuba Research Institute at Florida International University in Miami, says that some exiles with political aspirations in a post-Castro Cuba "fear that [U.S.] engagement might lead to the kind of change in which the Cuban-American community would be frozen out." In general, he says, exiles are motivated by "the desire for triumph. Peaceful change would be like he [Castro] won and they lost."
Courting Cubans. The White House, alarmed by Clinton's sagging popularity in Florida, is especially sensitive to these concerns. Administration officials charge that White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and senior adviser George Stephanopoulos -- both far more attuned to domestic opinion polls than foreign- policy considerations -- have been making excessive concessions to the vocal Cuban-exile community in South Florida.
Perez and others are puzzled by the Clinton administration's persistent courting of the conservative Cuban-American community in Florida, since 75 percent of the Cubans are registered Republicans. They are a key vote in Republican primaries but make up only about 8 percent of Florida voters. But Cuba expert Pamela Falk, who was staff director for the House of Representatives' Western Hemisphere subcommittee, says any administration must address the Cuban-Americans' concerns. "What makes exiles so nervous is their well-founded fears that the embargo will be lifted without a true democratic process," she says.
Falk nonetheless argues that both the United States and Castro have sufficient incentives to begin negotiations that would start with immigration and could move toward an agreement on elections in which Castro would not run. "Castro can forestall a violent eruption, and the United States gets to push toward a democratic process," she says.
In fact, the Clinton administration had been quietly promoting contact with Cuba. Since Clinton took office, more humanitarian aid, travel by exiles and academics, and cultural exchanges have been permitted, and U.S. telecommunications firms are negotiating to improve service to the island. A plan to allow broadcasts and open U.S. news bureaus in Havana worked its way through the bureaucracy but has stalled in the White House. Now, in retaliation for Castro's allowing the exodus, the administration has
