by Kenneth T. Walsh


        Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro go back a ways. Clinton was still a teenager when Castro embarrassed his idol, John F. Kennedy, at the Bay of Pigs and almost triggered a nuclear war by accepting Soviet missiles on Cuban territory. "In his formative years, it was easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys," says an old Clinton friend from Arkansas. "Kennedy was good, Castro was bad. It was a simple matter to be on the side of the angels." 

        Clinton's 30-year-old feelings toward Castro, aides say, goes a long way toward explaining the president's hardheaded attitude toward Cuba today. Despite his insistence that economics must take priority over ideology and his overtures to the Communist regimes in China, North Korea and Vietnam, Clinton's attitude toward Castro seems stuck in the cold war. "The president thinks Castro has had every chance to make reforms," says a senior U.S. official, "and yet he has failed to do so. For us to make concessions now would be a charade." 

        That view, of course, may change. But there is also a very personal reason for Clinton's current hard line. Castro played a role in the most traumatic event of Clinton's political life: his 1980 defeat for re-election as Arkansas governor. After Castro flooded the United States with Cuban refugees in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, Clinton accepted thousands of the migrants at Fort Chaffee, Ark. When they rioted and some escaped into the surrounding community, many Arkansas voters blamed Clinton. So last month, when his advisers told him Castro was about to unleash another wave of disaffected Cubans, the president's first reaction was: "We will not have another Mariel boatlift." 

        Fighting the tide. Clinton, meanwhile, thinks Castro brought on most of his own problems by relying too much on economic subsidies from the former Soviet Union. Now that those subsidies are gone, Clinton faults Castro for failing to see the inevitability of change. The president, says a senior White House official, sees Castro bucking the tide "in a hemisphere where democracy is taking hold." 

        Yet Clinton has rejected taking any military action to oust Castro. Again, his views are rooted in the 1960s. Clinton reminds associates that a Kennedy-backed invasion by Cuban exiles failed miserably at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. The president also says privately that the United States alone cannot "transform the society," and he wants to steer away from "nation building." Unlike Haiti, Clinton says, Cuba is too big and complex for any outside force to intervene there successfully. 

        The president's memories, combined with fear of angering conservative Cuban-Americans in Florida, have helped shape his hard line in the current refugee crisis. But by isolating Castro, the president, like all his predecessors since Kennedy, may only harden Castro's resolve to maintain the status quo.