The Clinton administration Sunday downplayed any thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations, two days after an immigration accord was reached with the island nation in an attempt to shut down the Cuban raft flotilla.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher and U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright both emphasized no talks would be held on anything other than refugee issues.
Their insistence Cuban leader Fidel Castro make significant human rights moves before any diplomatic openings comes despite congressional and world pressure to lift a 32-year-old U.S. trade embargo.
U.S. officials Friday agreed to accept a minimum of 20,000 refugees annually from Cuba. Relaxed immigration rules will be announced by the end of this week, U.S. officials said.
In return, Castro agreed to non-violently halt by Tuesday a raft exodus toward Florida that at times reached several thousand Cubans a day.
Albright lambasted Castro, a 35-year U.S. nemesis: "What we want to see is the removal of a tyrant and the creation of a democratic society in Cuba, the last communist holdout," she said on ABC's This Week With David Brinkley.
That pressure is at odds with such influential Democratic congressional leaders as House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., and his Senate counterpart, Claiborne Pell, D-R.I.
"I think the fundamental flaw is that they are focusing policy on the person of Castro" because of his "horrible" past, Hamilton said.
But with Cuba in economic shambles, "I don't believe Castro represents any threat to us today or the national security of the United States," he said.
The embargo has been recently tightened to restrict money transfers and charter flights. Hamilton said the embargo should be gradually lifted, starting with food, medicine and communications, including reopening direct telephone service.
"I'd like in a sense to invade Cuba with people, with facts, with ideas, with food," he said, to prepare for a post-Castro democracy.
Cuban police Sunday began to patrol Havana's Cojimar neighborhood in Havana, a favorite launching point, to make sure no new rafts are brought to the beach, The Associated Press reported.
"We're lucky; we're the last," said rafter Maria Rodriguez, setting sail in a makeshift craft of welded metal and inner tubes.
But Sunday, the Coast Guard plucked 684 U.S.-bound Cubans out of the water. They will likely end up back in Cuba in refugee camps at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. U.S. policy was changed last month to detain refugees indefinitely rather than offer asylum.
Sunday in Guantanamo, 2,500 Cubans demonstrated against the immigration agreement, Reuters news service reported. But military guards turned back a march toward the main base without any reported injuries. Saturday, a Cuban protester was wounded by a guard's bayonet.
