Trade Embargo

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton has decided to lift the 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam, and could announce the move at a White House ceremony before the end of the week, according to administration officials.The decision, which would mark a historic step of reconciliation, follows a formal recommendation by Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher late last week, which in turn capped long deliberations by the administration over the highly emotional issue. The White House is expected to attach no conditions to the ending of the trade ban, officials said.

WASHINGTON -President Barack Obama is permitting unlimited travel and transfer of money by Cuban-Americans to their relatives in Cuba and sponsoring greater telecommunications with the island, while keeping a long-standing U.S. embargo against trade with Cuba in place. The State, Treasury and Commerce departments will lift "all restrictions" on the visits of family members to Cuba and remittances of money, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday. This "series of steps ... to reach out to the Cuban people" is intended to "help bridge the gap between divided Cuban families," Gibbs said, and in turn promote greater freedom and human rights in the communist nation.

An Iranian-born businessman admitted yesterday that he tried to ship sophisticated scientific equipment from Maryland to Iran in violation of a U.S. trade embargo - a transaction that was ultimately blocked by an undercover sting operation. Mohammad R. Ehsan, 50, pleaded guilty in federal court in Baltimore to a charge of making a false statement to customs officials. His business, P&M Trading Inc., based in California, pleaded guilty to violating the trade restrictions. U.S. District Judge William M. Nickerson sentenced Ehsan to one year of probation and fined him $5,000.

TO UNDERSTAND President Bush's unwavering allegiance to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, Americans need only know his dinner plans last night. After giving anti-Havana speeches in Washington and Miami yesterday, Mr. Bush was to attend a private dinner at the Miami home of a prominent Cuban-American developer. A dinner invitation could be got for a reported $25,000 donation to the Florida Republican Party, money likely to help Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in his re-election bid. The power of the Cuban-American vote in South Florida - a deciding factor in the president's Florida victory in the contested 2000 election - has become a primary consideration in formulating U.S. foreign policy in Cuba.

WASHINGTON -President Barack Obama is permitting unlimited travel and transfer of money by Cuban-Americans to their relatives in Cuba and sponsoring greater telecommunications with the island, while keeping a long-standing U.S. embargo against trade with Cuba in place. The State, Treasury and Commerce departments will lift "all restrictions" on the visits of family members to Cuba and remittances of money, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday. This "series of steps ... to reach out to the Cuban people" is intended to "help bridge the gap between divided Cuban families," Gibbs said, and in turn promote greater freedom and human rights in the communist nation.

WASHINGTON -- Citing progress on Vietnam's efforts to determine the fate of missing Americans, the Clinton administration is moving toward easing the economic embargo against Hanoi and plans to consult Congress about it early in the new year, administration officials said yesterday.A senior administration official said President Clinton's top foreign policy advisers would meet "very soon" to decide whether to recommend the lifting of the embargo, which was imposed after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

WITH Pope John Paul II's just-concluded visit to Cuba, debate has surfaced again about the value of the long-standing U.S. trade embargo with that country -- a trade embargo first enacted when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.During his visit to Cuba, the pope was not shy about criticizing Castro for limiting Cubans' freedoms.The pontiff was also critical of the United States for its trade embargo, condemning it for the misery he believes it has brought to the Cuban people.The question, then, becomes this: Should the United States lift its embargo with Cuba, in hopes that a more normal economic relationship will nurture the kinds of changes that the pontiff and many other proponents would like to see?

IF the Baltimore Orioles can play exhibition games with Cuba's national team in Havana and Orioles Park this March, the world will be, if only marginally, a better place.The carefully hedged initiatives toward loosening relations with Cuba announced by the White House yesterday are welcome, but do not go far enough.Especially welcome is the permission for the Baltimore Orioles to send a mission to Havana to explore the possibility of games.Baseball could do for Cuban-American relations what Ping-Pong diplomacy did in paving the way for the Nixon administration's opening to China in the 1970s.

NEW YORK -- The Clinton administration held its first high-level meeting with Vietnam yesterday in what Vietnamese officials hope may be a prelude to a quick lifting of the U.S. trade embargo against Hanoi.In a session that was not announced, Assistant Secretary of State William Clark and other U.S. officials met in Washington for talks with Vietnam's outgoing ambassador to the United Nations, Trinh Xuan Lang.A Vietnamese official said that Winston Lord, who is awaiting confirmation as President Clinton's assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, also participated in the talks with the Vietnamese ambassador, but the State Department would not confirm this.

TO UNDERSTAND President Bush's unwavering allegiance to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, Americans need only know his dinner plans last night. After giving anti-Havana speeches in Washington and Miami yesterday, Mr. Bush was to attend a private dinner at the Miami home of a prominent Cuban-American developer. A dinner invitation could be got for a reported $25,000 donation to the Florida Republican Party, money likely to help Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in his re-election bid. The power of the Cuban-American vote in South Florida - a deciding factor in the president's Florida victory in the contested 2000 election - has become a primary consideration in formulating U.S. foreign policy in Cuba.

HAVANA, Cuba - As the Bush administration prepares to announce a more aggressive policy on Cuba, former President Jimmy Carter strongly warned that such a move would be counterproductive. Carter said yesterday that the Cuban dissidents he met with on Thursday "expressed deep concerns" that aid from the United States would help President Fidel Castro dismiss their efforts as illegitimate. President Bush is expected to announce on Monday the results of a policy review on Cuba, which could suggest helping dissidents, human rights advocates and independent journalists.

THE AXIS OF EVIL has been expanded by a factor of one wily Cuban dictator. That's the latest on terrorism from the Bush administration. In an address this week to the Heritage Foundation, John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, accused Cuba of sharing its biotechnology capabilities with "rogue" states for possibly nefarious uses. He offered nothing substantive to support his contention and neither did the State Department. How convenient that the Bush administration sounds the terrorism alarm the week before former President Jimmy Carter travels to Havana on a humanitarian mission.

WASHINGTON - When ships loaded with American agricultural products pulled into Havana harbor recently, it marked the first sale of U.S. farm goods to Cuba in four decades. The sales, which will total an estimated $30 million, are perhaps the most important commercial event since the United States imposed the trade embargo on Cuba. Under a law passed in 2000, the U.S. embargo permits sales of agricultural products to Cuba but forbids U.S. financing of such sales. Frustrated by this unusual prohibition, Fidel Castro declared that Cuba would not buy "a single grain of rice" from the United States.

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush was asked to defend his support for free trade at the Quebec summit, he said simply, "Trade is very important to this hemisphere. Trade not only helps spread prosperity but trade helps spread freedom." For the big-money interests who have pushed free trade so vehemently, Mr. Bush's comments were a comforting balance of altruism, patriotism and pro-business rhetoric. But for the rest of us, they were a troubling portrait of the contradictions, inadequacies and ulterior motives of a detrimental trade policy that corporate America wants rammed down our throats.

An Iranian-born businessman admitted yesterday that he tried to ship sophisticated scientific equipment from Maryland to Iran in violation of a U.S. trade embargo - a transaction that was ultimately blocked by an undercover sting operation. Mohammad R. Ehsan, 50, pleaded guilty in federal court in Baltimore to a charge of making a false statement to customs officials. His business, P&M Trading Inc., based in California, pleaded guilty to violating the trade restrictions. U.S. District Judge William M. Nickerson sentenced Ehsan to one year of probation and fined him $5,000.

IF the Baltimore Orioles can play exhibition games with Cuba's national team in Havana and Orioles Park this March, the world will be, if only marginally, a better place.The carefully hedged initiatives toward loosening relations with Cuba announced by the White House yesterday are welcome, but do not go far enough.Especially welcome is the permission for the Baltimore Orioles to send a mission to Havana to explore the possibility of games.Baseball could do for Cuban-American relations what Ping-Pong diplomacy did in paving the way for the Nixon administration's opening to China in the 1970s.

UNITED NATIONS -- Western diplomats say that President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia has accepted a compromise plan for monitoring the trade embargo he has imposed on the Bosnian Serbs.In return, the diplomats told the New York Times yesterday, the Security Council will move to ease sanctions on his country as early as next week.The United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia -- the "contact group" of countries trying to make peace in Bosnia -- had announced that if the Serbs agreed to allow international observers to watch their borders, the economic embargo against Serbia would be progressively relaxed.

WITH Pope John Paul II's just-concluded visit to Cuba, debate has surfaced again about the value of the long-standing U.S. trade embargo with that country -- a trade embargo first enacted when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.During his visit to Cuba, the pope was not shy about criticizing Castro for limiting Cubans' freedoms.The pontiff was also critical of the United States for its trade embargo, condemning it for the misery he believes it has brought to the Cuban people.The question, then, becomes this: Should the United States lift its embargo with Cuba, in hopes that a more normal economic relationship will nurture the kinds of changes that the pontiff and many other proponents would like to see?