The cuban ethnic electoral policy cycle.pdf

The Personal Is Political: The Cuban Ethnic Electoral Policy CycleAuthor(s): Susan EcksteinSource: Latin American Politics and Society, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Spring, 2009), pp. 119-148Published by: Distributed by Wiley on behalf of the Center for Latin American Studies at the Universityof MiamiStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30136766 .

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Policy Issues

The Personal Is Political: The Cuban Ethnic Electoral Policy Cycle

Susan Eckstein

ABSTRACT

This article documents a U.S. Cuban foreign policy cycle that operated in tandem with the presidential electoral cycle between 1992 and 2004. During these post-Cold War years, when Cuba posed no threat to U.S. national security, influential, well-organized Cuban Americans leveraged political contributions and votes to tighten the embargo on travel and trade, especially at the personal level. U.S. presidential candidates, most notably incumbent presidents seeking re-election, responded to their demands with discretionary powers of office. When presidential candidates supported policies that made good electoral sense but conflicted with concerns of state, they subsequently reversed or left unimplemented Cuba initiatives. After describing the logic behind an ethnic electoral policy cycle and U.S. personal embargo policy between 1992 and 2004, this article exam- ines Cuban American voter participation, political and policy preferences, lobbying, political contributions, and the relationship between the ethnic policy and presidential election cycles.

Washington policymakers have restricted ties between Cuban emi-

gres and their homeland friends and families for half a century, since the Cuban revolution. Initially they justified the embargo, including the so-called personal embargo, on which this article focuses, as a means to advance national security concerns. Yet in the post-Cold War era, when Cuba no longer trained Latin American insurgents, and when it mothballed its nuclear power facility, cut back dramatically its military capacity, withdrew troops from Africa, and ended its alliance with the Soviet Union as the superpower joined the dustbin of history, U.S. policymakers not only continued but tightened the embargo. Moreover, in the post-Cold War period, personal embargo policy and policy rationale vacillated and lacked coherence. Why?

This article will show that an ethnic policy cycle operated in tandem with the U.S. presidential electoral cycle. Between 1992 and 2004, influential Cuban Americans leveraged political contributions, along with votes, for embargo tightening. In election years, incumbent presidents seeking re-election responded to their demands and to the congressional support they curried. So did presidential candidates with-

C 2009 University of Miami



120 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 51: 1

out the power of office commit themselves to the causes the influential Cuban Americans sought to champion. But in nonelection years, when policies implemented to win votes conflicted with other concerns of state, presidents reversed or left unimplemented their election-year Cuba initiatives.

After briefly outlining both the logic on which an ethnic electoral policy cycle rests and U.S. personal embargo policy between 1992 and 2004 (plus macro-level embargo policies, when relevant), this article analyzes Cuban American voter participation and political preferences, Cuban American lobbying and political contributions, and the relationship between the ethnic policy and presidential election cycles.

BASIS OF AN ETHNIC ELECTORAL POLICY CYCLE

Edward Tufte (1978) argues, in the context of U.S. domestic politics, that there exists a political economic policy cycle, linked to the presidential electoral cycle. It is the contention of this essay that so, too, may there be an ethnic policy cycle tied to the presidential voting cycle, and that between 1992 and 2004, an ethnic policy cycle had roots in Cuban American preferences. Although the electoral cycle did not predeter- mine the policies, and although presidential elections did not alone determine U.S. Cuba policy, electoral dynamics set policy parameters in a manner heretofore not analytically denoted.1 The Cuba policy cycle and its variability during election and nonelection years shares charac- teristics with the political economic cycle delineated by Tufte.

Tufte convincingly demonstrates cyclical manipulation of economic initiatives that were not always economically sound. To win re-election, he shows, politicians take advantage of incumbency to implement economic reforms advantageous to their opportunistic, short-term political interests but inappropriate for the long term. In such instances, once re- elected, they attempt to reverse policies. Tufte adds, however, that incumbents are not entirely free to intervene as they choose. They may be constrained by factors beyond their control, such as pressures from divided interests and their own incompetence.

If there is an electoral base to economic policymaking, why not an electoral base to ethnic policymaking? An ethnic policy cycle would be expected to differ from the economic policy cycle in what it delivers. It would similarly be linked, however, to an incumbent president's use of discretionary powers of office to win re-election. It would rest on a tacit "ethnic bargain," implementation of ethnic-favored policies as a quid pro quo for political support.

The vote-getting bargain in the Cuban American case focuses mainly on foreign policy.2 It is premised on the promotion of a hard line toward Cuba, which its Cuban American proponents envision as isolat-



ECKSTEIN: CUBA POLICY 121

ing the Castro-led regime in a multiplicity of ways so as to destabilize it to the point of collapse.3

Were there an ethnic policy cycle linked to elections, government ethnic policy initiatives would be expected to vary in election and nonelection years; to be responsive in election years to concerns and wants of the ethnic electorate; to be reversed or left unenforced in nonelection years, when voter-driven reforms conflicted with nonelectoral concerns of governance; and to be contingent on, and weighed against, the import of other concerns of state. Tufte, in his economic policy cycle, however, focuses his vote-getting and policy analysis too narrowly. He ignores the role lobbyists and campaign contributors may play behind the scenes.

THE OFFICIAL PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE EMBARGO

The U.S. personal embargo of Cuba includes containment of emigre homeland travel and of the sending of remittances. Travel restrictions affect Cuban Americans' ability to bond with friends and family who still live in Cuba, while remittance-sending restrictions have an impact on Cuban Americans' ability to share earnings with such persons. Both sets of restrictions limit Cuban government access to diaspora dollars. U.S. policy with respect to these two components of the personal embargo shifted during the period under study.

Travel Rights

Washington never permitted Cuban Americans to decide for themselves who in Cuba they visited, with what frequency, and for how long.4 But Congress and, especially, presidents varied in how restrictive they were. Even individual presidents waffled in the travel rights they honored.

The 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, the first post-Cold War Cuba- related foreign policy legislation, tightened embargo loopholes. President George H. W. Bush signed it into law during his last months in office. While the bill did not specifically address travel, it granted the Treasury Department civil penalty enforcement authority over visits.5 At the same time, the legislation included a set of provisions, known as Track 2, that allowed for improved cross-border people-to-people engagement, including improved telephone and mail service. Emigres who wished to communicate with island friends and family, as a result, could do so more easily than in the preceding 30 years of Castro's rule.6

After assuming the presidency, Bill Clinton, a Democrat, used his discretionary power to regulate U.S.-to-Cuba travel. In 1994 he introduced measures more restrictive than those of his Republican prede- cessor. Clinton limited visits to cases involving "extreme hardship," such as to see terminally ill relatives. Cuban Americans had to demonstrate




"extreme humanitarian" need, and they were required to obtain a special license for travel from the Treasury Department.

In a partial about-face, the following year Clinton's administration relaxed restrictions. While limiting family visits to once a year, for vaguely defined "extreme humanitarian need," Cuban Americans no longer had to obtain a special license for taking trips. They needed only an affidavit, which airline charter companies could provide; and with special Treasury Department authorization, they could make additional trips. Clinton justified his changed stance politically. Visits, he argued, would promote democracy and the free flow of ideas. The relaxation of regulations built on the Track 2 tolerance of cross-border people-to- people ties.

Then, in 1996, Clinton reversed his travel policy again. First he sus- pended indefinitely U.S.-Cuba charter flights, which he previously had permitted, and shortly thereafter he signed into law the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act. The new legislation called, among its measures, for political changes in Cuba as a precondition for renewal of travel rights.' In a non-binding so-called sense of Congress, the law specified that the U.S. president should require the Cuban government to release political prisoners and to recognize the right of association and other fundamental freedoms before reinstituting general licenses for family visits. Cuban Americans who wished see island relatives were to pay a price for the undemocratic practices of the Cuban state-practices that had contributed to their own decision to emigrate.

In yet another turnabout, and in defiance of the political preconditions the 1996 legislation denoted as prerequisite for the resumption of visitation rights, Clinton permitted charter flights anew in March 1998. Then, in January of the following year, his administration expanded the number of U.S. and island cities between which air flights were permissible and eased travel license procedures. Clinton publicly legitimated his latest travel opening in the context of Pope John Paul II's historic 1998 visit to Cuba. While on the island, His Holiness had called for the world to open to Cuba and Cuba to the world. In justifying the travel opening, Clinton turned the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act rationale for restricting travel on its head. Whereas the 1996 legislation called for island democratization as a prerequisite for travel liberalization, two years later Clinton reverted to his 1995 argument that cross-border ties would foster democratization in Cuba by strengthening civil society.

Simultaneously, momentum built up in Congress to reverse the restrictive travel stance emboldened in the Cuban Liberty and Democra- tic Solidarity Act for U.S. citizens in general, not merely for those of Cuban origin. Nevertheless, in the closing months of Clinton's presidency, Con- gress legislated a travel cap for the first time. The law specified that Cuban Americans could visit their homeland a maximum of once a year.




Clinton's presidential successor, George W. Bush, similarly wavered in his travel policy. Initially, he blocked renewed congressional moves to lift the travel ban, behind the scenes (LeoGrande 2005, 23). But on March 24, 2003, he initiated travel rules for Cuban Americans more permissive than Clinton's. Then, the following year, he implemented regulations more restrictive than Clinton's.

The 2003 relaxation of restrictions expanded the range of island kin Cuban Americans could visit to three degrees of genealogical remove and ended the Clinton-era requirement that visits be confined to cases of "humanitarian need."8 In contrast, the 2004 clampdown reduced family visitation rights from once a year to once every three years; narrowed the range of relatives permitted to visit immediate kin; limited trips to two weeks, the duration previously not capped; and required anew special Treasury Department permits for trips. The 2004 regulations allowed for no humanitarian exceptions, not even to pay final respects to a close, dying island relative.

Thus, at a time when travel was permitted to other remaining Com- munist countries, such as China and Vietnam, U.S. presidents, occa- sionally with congressional backing, restricted Cuban American homeland visitation rights. But they vacillated in how restrictive they were. Even more striking is that individual presidents, Democratic and Repub- lican alike, waffled in the travel rights they honored during their terms of office. The restrictions defied U.S. commitments to freedom of travel and family values.

Remittance-sending Rights

Policymakers also regulated Cuban American rights to decide for themselves how much, if any, of their U.S. earnings they shared, in cash or kind, with friends and family who remained in Cuba. Rules changed over the years, often in tandem with shifts in travel policy. Policymak- ers restricted Cuban emigre remittance sending at a time when other immigrant group cross-border income transfers soared. Remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean quadrupled in the 1990s. By 2007 they totaled $66.5 billion (IDB 2008).

Remittance restrictions were designed to limit the Cuban government's access to hard currency. Because Cuba depended on hard currency in the post-Soviet era for trade, investment, and foreign loan repayments (Eckstein 2003, 2004), without diaspora dollars, anti-Cas- troites reasoned, the regime might collapse. But with the island economic crisis that ensued when Soviet aid and trade ended, ordinary Cubans themselves wanted dollars. Their peso earnings no longer suf- ficed to meet their basic needs, much less to cover costs of other goods and services they coveted.




Despite ordinary Cubans' desperation for dollars, President George H. W. Bush lowered the remittance cap that President Carter had instituted by eight hundred dollars annually. He reduced the quarterly cap from five hundred to three hundred dollars (Barberia 2004, 390, 392). Then the Cuban Democracy Act that Bush signed into law imposed further remittance restrictions. The law specified that the president should limit the sending of remittances to Cuba by people in the United States for the purpose of financing travel to the United States, in order to ensure that remittances were not used by the Cuban government to gain access to dollars. The law also specified that the restrictions should remain in effect until the U.S. president determined and reported to Congress that the government of Cuba had instituted democratic reforms and had moved toward establishing a free market economic system (U.S. Department of State 1992).

Whereas Bush implemented increasingly restrictive remittance measures, Clinton waffled on the matter. Ultimately, though, he ignored the economic and political preconditions specified not only in the 1992 but also in the 1996 embargo-tightening legislation. In 1994 his administration cut back on the remittance-sending rights that Bush had permitted. It prohibited gift parcels, as well as cash remittances, except on a case-by-case basis for family in extreme humanitarian emergencies, such as when an island relative was terminally ill or in severe medical need. Two years later, Clinton supported further restrictions when he signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Soli- darity Act. As with the travel restrictions, the 1996 legislation included a nonbinding "sense of Congress" specifying that the Cuban government should permit the "unfettered operation of small businesses" before the U.S. reinstated general licenses for the sending of family remittances to Cuba. At the time, the Cuban government tolerated only selective types of private economic activity among its citizens, and it prohibited persons in business for themselves from employing people who were not family members. In the language of the 1996 law, Cubans faced entrepreneurial fetters.

Then, in 1998, Clinton made an about-face and reinstated the right of Cuban Americans to remit up to $300 quarterly to island family members. In January 1999, he relaxed remittance-sending rights even further. He announced that all U.S. citizens, whether or not they had close family on the island, could send up to $1,200 in remittances annually.

George W. Bush similarly waffled in his remittance policy. Initially more permissive than Clinton, he ultimately was more restrictive. In March 2003, when easing the travel restrictions, he raised the remittance cap. Cuban Americans now could carry up to three thousand dollars with them on homeland visits, in addition to the three hundred dollars they could send quarterly from the United States.




In mid-2004, however, Bush reversed his stance. He lowered the amount of remittances trip takers could carry with them on visits to $300, and he lowered per diem permitted expenses from $167 to $50. He also narrowed the range of islanders with whom Cuban Americans could share income to the same immediate kin to whom he restricted visitation rights that year (and only if the kin were not senior-level government officials or party functionaries). The new income-transfer cap allowed Cuban emigres to remit one-third to one-half the amount the average Latin American immigrant at the time shared with homeland family (Economist 2002; New York Times 2003, 2008).

In 2004 the Bush administration also clamped down on Cuban American rights to give gifts in kind (see EIU 2004, 15). For one thing, it capped the weight of luggage travelers could take on trips to 44 pounds, whereas previously no cap had been imposed. The average estimated weight of luggage when the new restriction went into effect was 60 pounds. The Bush administration also limited the range of goods permissible to send from the United States to food, radios, batteries, vitamins, medicines, and medical equipment, with a monthly value not to exceed $200.

THE ETHNIC VOTE

Cuban Americans account for less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. But despite their small number, they have magnified their political influence by primarily residing in the largest electoral "swing state," Florida; by electing "their own" to local offices; and by prioritizing ethnic concerns when voting. The U.S. state-based, winner-take-all electoral college system contributed to the importance of their vote in presidential elections. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Cuban Americans accounted for 8 percent of the electorate in a state commanding one- tenth of the electoral college votes (Pain 2003).

Cuban Americans take both citizenship and voting rights seriously. In 1990 nearly 60 percent of Cuban Americans in Miami, where most Cuban Americans live, were U.S. citizens (Eckstein 2009, table 3.1). By 2004, two-thirds of them were citizens, with 90 percent of those of voting age registered voters (see table 1).

Cuban Americans also tend to vote in blocs, and the extent of their bloc-voting has an impact on electoral outcomes. Florida used to be Democratic until the Republicans, during Ronald Reagan's presidency, courted Cuban Americans as part of their strategy to win over the South (Black and Black 2002). Indeed, Cuban American party switching from Democratic to Republican helped the state become contested terrain.

In South Florida, Cuban Americans used their vote to help elect co- ethnic candidates to office, including at the congressional level. As of




Table 1. Political Participation, Partisan Preferences, and Ethnic Representation Among Cuban Americans in Miami,

2004 and 2007 (percent)

Year of Emigration 1959-64 1965-74 1975-84 1985-2004 U.S.-born All

Citizens 96 (97)a 90 (97) 71 (81) 24 98 (99) 67 1985-94: 56

1995-2007: 19

Registered 95 (97) 93 (98) 86 (92) 82 86 (94) 90 (91) voter if citizen 1985-94: 85 and age-eligible 1995-2007: 60

Registered 7 (12) (13) (17) 14 26 (22) Independent 1985-94: 10

1995-2007: 13

Registered 74 (77) 80 (73) 68 (73) 67 42 (50) 69 (66) Republican 1985-94: 66

1995-2007: 61

Candidate's 75 75 74 78 69 75 position on Cuba important in determining vote

Satisfaction with 85 92 85 84 77 86 Congress member representing interviewee's views on Cuba

N = 1,811 in 2004, 1,000 in 2007 aData for 2007 in parentheses Source: FIU-IPOR 2004, 2007

1992, two Miami Cuban Americans were serving in Congress; ten years later a third was elected. Then, in 2004, Florida elected a Cuban Amer- ican senator for the first time, Mel Martinez.

Survey data reveal that Cuban American voters take ethnic concerns, and not merely the ethnicity of candidates, into account when voting. In February 2004, Florida International University's Institute for Public Opinion Research (FIU-IPOR) found 86 percent of more than 1,800 Miami Cuban Americans it queried to concur that the three South Florida Cuban American Congress members represented them well on Cuban matters (table 1). The three representatives were outspoken anti- Castroites who advocated and supported embargo-tightening measures. Three-fourths of those interviewed also noted that a candidate's position on Cuba influenced their vote (table 1). Two-thirds of them supported




continuation of the embargo, while slightly more than half of them opposed unrestricted travel rights (table 2).

Thus, were there an ethnic policy cycle, election-year measures would be expected to address Cuban Americans' concerns about Cuba. With most of the Cuban American populace committed to a hard line on Cuba, policies implemented to win votes should be of an embargo- tightening sort.

CUBAN AMERICAN LOBBYING AND PAC CONTRIBUTInONS

U.S. Cuba policy, including that regarding the personal embargo, needs to be understood also in the context of Cuban American lobbying and campaign contributions. Cuban Americans formed a political action committee (PAC), through which they channeled funds to elect Cuban and non-Cuban Americans alike, across the partisan divide and nationwide as well as in Florida, to defend and advance a hard U.S. line on Cuba. Between the 1980s and 2000, they lobbied and channeled political contributions mainly through organizations associated with the Cuban American National Foundation (commonly called the Founda- tion). Beginning in 2001, however, a new organization and then a new PAC carried the hardline torch.

Formally, the Foundation's main goal was to advance freedom and democracy in Cuba (CANF 2007). Reagan, during his first presidential term, helped give the Foundation its initial boost by overseeing the channeling of hundreds of thousands of federal dollars to a Foundation- affiliated organization via the National Endowment for Democracy (Fonzi 1993, 11; Haney and Vanderbush 2005, 43-44).

The Foundation, however, quickly established a revenue base of its own. Jorge Mas Canosa, its influential and charismatic chief officer, per- suaded fellow Cuban Americans who successfully shared in the Ameri- can dream to make large annual contributions to the organization. By the early 1990s, the Foundation claimed 50,000 members and by the beginning of the twenty-first century 5,000 more, with 170 directors, trustees, and associates reputedly contributing $1,000 to $10,000 annually (Cuba Information Archives n.d.; Tamayo 2002).

Mas Canosa oversaw the formation of both a formally autonomous lobbying organization, the Cuban American Foundation (CAF), and a Political Action Committee, the Free Cuba PAC. Between the time of its founding and 2000, the Free Cuba PAC accounted for all but 1 percent of Cuban American PAC political donations. It took in nearly $1.7 million and made $1.3 million in campaign contributions.9

Under Mas Canosa's tutelage, the Foundation's influence extended from the local to the national level. The Foundation became one of the




Table 2. Views Toward U.S. Cuba Policies Among Cuban Americans in Miami, 2004 and 2007 (percent)

Year of Emigration

1959-64 1965-74 1975-84 1985+ U.S.-born Total

1. Favors 29 26 38 61 56 43 (57) reestablishing diplomatic ties

2. Believes 68 (71)a 70 (65) 73 (70) 81 78 (82) 75 (77) embargo 1985-94:79 overall does 1995-2007: 83 not work

3. Favors 75 (78) 77 (79) 68 (68) 56 54 (54) 66 (58) continuation 1985-94:48 of embargo 1995-2007:41

4. Favors 45 (43) 41(49) 54 (50) 68 71(83) 56 (65) dialogue 1985-94:66 among exiles, 1995-2007:79 dissidents, and Cuban government

5. Favors return (36) (52) (49) 1985-94:71 (64) (64) to Bush 1995-2007:86 policies until 2003

6. Favors 28 (23) 30 (33) 41(34) 68 51(57) 46 (55) unrestricted 1985-94:67 travel 1995-2007:80

7. Should stop 65 (63) 69 (52) 56 (51) 35 33 (30) 51(40) agricultural 1985-94:36 trade with 1995-2007:26 Cuba

8. Favors 61(59) 58 (64) 64 (69) 80 79 (68) 69 (72) allowing 1985-94:69 companies to 1995-2007: 85 sell medicine to Cuba

9. Allow U.S. 42 (37) 39 (46) 50 (56) 72 65 (69) 55 (62) companies 1985-94:62 to sell food 1995-2007:78 to Cuba

N = 1,811 in 2004, 1,000 in 2007 aData for 2007 in parentheses Sources: FIU-IPOR 2004, 2007




most effective U.S. lobbies and the second-most moneyed ethnic lobbying group (Smith 2000).

Through its PAC, the Foundation financed campaigns of Cuban Americans who defended the embargo and its tightening. At the congressional level, it donated funds not only to the campaigns of the three South Florida Cuban American Republicans but also to that of Robert Menindez, a Cuban American New Jersey Democrat, who served first in the House and then, beginning in 2005, in the Senate. Menandez, who became the third-largest recipient of Cuban American political contributions, supported and advanced the Foundation's stance on Cuba matters to the point of breaking ranks with Democratic colleagues, including President Clinton. Siding with the Foundation, Men~ndez opposed Clin- ton's efforts both to improve U.S.-Cuba relations in 1999 through "baseball diplomacy" and to return six-year-old Eliin Gonzilez to his father in Cuba in 2000.10 The Foundation, along with outspoken and belliger- ent Cuban Americans, fought to keep Eliin in the United States after his mother died at sea in their effort to emigrate without entry permission. The Clinton Administration, in contrast, pressed for the boy's return to his father. Menandez never supported a Cuba-related policy that his mainly Republican Florida campaign financiers opposed.

To rally congressional support for legislation it favored, the Foun- dation also supported campaigns of non-Cuban Americans. Whereas in the 1980s it was already leveraging political contributions for legislation it believed would help bring the Castro regime to heel, it went on to lobby successfully for embargo tightening in the post-Cold War era. Key sponsors of Cuba-related legislation were recipients of Foundation- linked PAC funding. The main sponsor of a Congressional initiative during the Reagan years to allot $10 million in federal funds for Radio Marti to beam anti-Castro messages to people in Cuba was Senator Paula Hawkins, a Florida Republican. She was one of the top ten recipients of Cuban American campaign funding between 1979 and 2000.

The chief congressional sponsor of the first post-Cold War embargo-tightening legislation, the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, was Robert Torricelli. Like Menendez, Torricelli was a New Jersey Democrat, but not of Cuban descent. Torricelli was the second-largest recipient of Cuban American funding between 1979 and 2000 and, as the political contributions flowed to his campaign coffers, the former advocate of U.S.-Cuba dialogue championed tightening the embargo (Morley and McGillion 2002, 15-16). Torricelli's Senate partner in promoting the bill, Florida Democrat Bob Graham, who also was of non-Cuban origin, was the sixth-largest recipient of Cuban American political donations during the same 21-year period.

The Foundation secured additional support for the Cuba Democ- racy Act by courting both 1992 presidential candidates with campaign




contributions. In the 1992 electoral cycle, George H. W. Bush was the fifth-largest recipient of Cuban American political donations. Clinton received far fewer dollars, but he was very transparent in his quid pro quo. After receiving $275,000 from Cuban Americans at two Miami Foundation-associated fundraising events during his campaign, he announced his support for the Cuban Democracy Act, then pending in Congress, which Bush ultimately signed into law before the election.

The next major embargo-tightening legislation the Foundation backed, the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, was informally known as the Helms-Burton bill, after its two key sponsors. The two sponsors received substantial Cuban American campaign contributions either shortly before introducing the legislation or when Con- gress deliberated the bill. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican, received $61,000 from Cuban Americans in the 1990s, and nothing before that; Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina received $76,000 Cuban American PAC dollars, almost all in 1995-96 when he was running for re-election. Besides specifying Cuban prodemocracy and market reforms as prerequisites for lifting the personal embargo, the bill laid the legal basis for U.S. citizens to sue international investors in property the Castro-led government had expropriated from them.

Understanding that passage of embargo-tightening measures required wider support than from presidential candidates and legislative sponsors, the leadership of the Cuban American PAC strategically channeled funds to candidates nationwide whose support they sought. Law- makers who backed the two bills typically received substantially more contributions than those who opposed the legislation, and few recipients of Cuban American dollars voted against the bills.

Against the backdrop of diminished anticommunist fervor in the post-Cold War period, however, momentum built up in Congress to relax Cuba travel rules, along with trade restrictions. Congress did not let the spirit of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act stand in its way. In the changed milieu, the Foundation failed to block passage in 2000 of embargo exemptions allowing for the sale of food to Cuba. The more powerful U.S. agribusiness lobby pressed for access to the Cuba market. In the post-Cold War era, agribusiness could lobby more aggressively, no longer constrained by accusations of being "soft on Communism.""'1 The same year, nevertheless, the Foundation successfully lobbied to reverse the move in Congress to lift travel restrictions by persuading legislators to institute the once-a-year travel cap for Cuban American family visits.

Under the stewardship of Jorge Mas Santos, who took the Founda- tion's helm after his father died in 1997, the ethnic organization's financial base withered. The Foundation also became a moderate force. It

supported loosening the personal embargo and cross-border bridges




more generally. Hardliners, under the circumstances, broke away to form a new organization, the Cuban Liberty Council (CLC). In 2003, the CLC oversaw the formation of a new PAC, the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, to defend the embargo and advocate its further tightening, including at the people-to-people level.

By 2004 the new PAC had raised more than half a million dollars, double the amount the Free Cuba PAC had raised in its peak money-rais- ing year, during the Reagan administration. The new PAC immediately became one of the 150 largest of the more than 5,000 PACs in the United States and reputedly the largest political contributor on a foreign policy matter.12 That year the Foundation-linked PAC, in contrast, took in a mere $5,000 in contributions. At the same time, the value of the Foundation's endowment plunged to the point that it had to downsize its staff, close its Washington lobbying office, and shut down its Miami radio station.

In line with its motto, "Freedom First, Then Concession," the new U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC funneled contributions to help elect pro- embargo candidates, to defeat pro-embargo-loosening candidates, and to create an anti-Castro constituency among members of Congress who might otherwise have been indifferent to Cuban matters. In its first year in operation, the PAC targeted funds to 75 congressional candidates. At a time when Washington was improving relations with other Commu- nist countries and pushing for global trade liberalization, and when momentum was building in Congress to relax the Cuban embargo, the new PAC determinedly fought to maintain and tighten barriers across the Florida Straits.

The directorship of the new PAC considered its 2004 congressional mission accomplished when all but four of the candidates it supported won their electoral bids and when, in 2005, Congress tempered initiatives to ease Cuba travel and trade. New PAC funding recipients included 12 congressional representatives who, in the recent past, had consistently supported embargo-loosening measures but voted against all 2005 amendments to relax the embargo; 6 who had previously waffled in their support for embargo-loosening measures but who voted against all the 2005 amendments; 15 who reversed their initial stance on at least one of the 2005 embargo-loosening legislative proposals; and 19 just-elected legislators who voted against all the proposed amendments (Cuban American Alliance Education Fund 2005).

In 2007, the new PAC also helped to block an effort by the new Democratic-dominated Congress further to lift restrictions on agricultural trade with Cuba. PAC recipients who opposed the embargo loosening included representatives who previously had voted to loosen the embargo, as well as first-time legislators. In the 2007-8 electoral cycle the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC made $322,500 in political donations. Fifty-two of the 66 Democrats who voted against the proposed




embargo-loosening measure, including 17 of the 22 Democratic freshmen, had received PAC contributions (Swanson 2007).

Thus the new PAC fought to keep intact an embargo that, over more than 40 years, had failed to topple the Castro-led government. But whereas the PAC and the Foundation under Mas Canosa's leadership had effectively lobbied for Congress to tighten the embargo, the success of the new PAC was limited to fending off new embargo-loosening initiatives. The CLC and its hardline South Florida political allies could claim greater success, however, in influencing policy under presidential discretion. They were instrumental in President Bush's decision in 2004 to tighten dramatically the personal embargo.

The "ethnic bargain" under George W. Bush also brought material gain to a number of hardline Cuban American groups besides the CLC. In 2006, congressional auditors found that tens of millions of dollars of U.S. Agency for International Development funds, ostensibly allotted to promote democracy in Cuba, had been channeled to anti-Castro groups in Miami. The auditors found that 30 percent of the agency's Cuba- related expenditures were questionable. Critics contended that the Washington aid was intended more to win votes from Florida exiles than to promote change on the island. Also in 2006, a federal grand jury indicted a senior TV Marti executive for accepting one hundred thousand dollars in kickbacks from a broadcast company contracted to do business with the television operation (Miami Herald 2006). Accord- ingly, Cuban Americans, both personally and as a group, benefited materially from supporting Bush.

In sum, Cuban American lobbyists, backed by campaign contributions, influenced congressional legislation, presidential interventions, and funding at government discretion. They pressed for tightening the embargo despite the growing congressional momentum to relax it, including at the people-to-people level. Yet the same presidents who at certain times responded to the organized, moneyed ethnic interests by tightening the embargo at other times loosened it. How to explain their waffling, contradictory policies?

BLOC VOTING AND THE ETHNIC POLICY CYCLE

If an ethnic policy cycle exists, tied to the presidential electoral cycle, lobbyists' influence would be expected to peak in election years, when they had votes as well as political contributions to leverage. Ethnic con- cessions would be especially likely in years when incumbent presidents, with their discretionary powers, sought re-election. Furthermore, if an ethnic policy cycle existed, in nonelection years incumbents would be likely to reverse or not to enforce ethnic policies that conflicted with nonelectoral concerns of office.




Table 3. U.S. Embargo Tightening and Loosening Measures Since the Cold War

Personal Embargo Macro Embargo Incumbent

Wins Loses Loosening Tightening Loosening Tightening Florida Florida

1992 X X X 1994 x 1995 X 1996 x x x 1998 x 1999 x 2000 [Elifn]a Xb X Xc 2003 Xd 2004 X X

aEliin Gonzilez returned to Cuba amid Cuban American opposition bCodification of travel cap, amid pressure to lift travel restrictions (but no change in frequency of permitted visits) cIncumbent vice president runs for office, associated with incumbent president's

Eliin policy dLoosening of restrictions for Cuban Americans, though tightening of restrictions for other Americans

Table 3 summarizes embargo-loosening and -tightening policies in presidential election and nonelection years between 1992 and 2004. It notes whether the policies were implemented by an incumbent and whether the incumbent won the Florida vote. The summary table shows that embargo policies, in the main, became more restrictive in presidential election years. Our ethnic policy cycle thesis would predict this to be so, given both the hardline stance of the moneyed ethnic lobbyists and the general Cuban American support for the embargo during these years.

Specifically, George H. W. Bush supported the 1992 Cuban Democ- racy Act when running for re-election, after Clinton announced his support for the pending bill. Bush enacted the legislation to curry Cuban American votes in Florida. Understanding the importance of the state to his re-election bid, he strategically signed the bill in Miami on the eve of the election, and at the ceremony acknowledged Mas Canosa as one of the key forces behind the new law (Schoultz 2009, chap. 12). Further indication that his stance on the bill was electorally driven is that he previously had vetoed the so-called Mack Amendment, the precursor to the 1992 legislation. It is possible that had Clinton not made U.S. Cuba policy an electoral issue, Bush would not have reversed his stance on the pending legislation. The 1992 election marked the start of the Cuba




policy cycle. During the Cold War, U.S. Cuba policy was not, for all intents and purposes, contested or cyclically variable.

Bush had opposed the Mack initiative because of its extraterritorial claims. As a former director of the CIA, Bush was no friend of Cuban Communism. But he blocked the Mack Amendment once lobbied for by big business, which resented interference with its overseas profiteering, and especially by foreign governments, such as Canada, which resented U.S. interference in their trade dealings (Eckstein 1994, 282, n 33; Morley and McGilllion 2002, 43, 49). At the time, appeasing business and foreign allies mattered more to the President than placating Cuban Ameri- can hardliners.

It was in the context of his re-election bid that Bush withdrew his

opposition to embargo tightening through extraterritorial means. Like the Mack Amendment, the Cuban Democracy Act prohibited U.S. businesses from third-country trade with Cuba. When pressed to choose between backing business and ally interests and courting Cuban Amer- ican Florida votes in an election year, the latter mattered more. A further indication that his changed stance was electorally driven was that Bush, at the time, permitted U.S. companies to trade with other remaining Communist countries, both from the United States and through third countries. His stance on the pending legislation therefore was not driven by an overarching drive to block economic relations with Communist countries.

Bush's opportunism paid off. Three-fourths of Cuban Americans in Florida voted for him, enough to win the state. Given that U.S. Cuba policy mattered little to most of the national electorate, however, after the Cold War ended, his support for the Cuban Democracy Act did not suffice to win him nationwide re-election.

The 1996 election galvanized yet another ethnic policy cycle. Like Bush in 1992, Clinton, four years later, took advantage of incumbency to support new embargo-tightening legislation against the backdrop of his re-election bid. Also following Bush's example, Clinton signed pending embargo-tightening legislation that he previously had opposed. He was especially concerned about the bill's internationally unpopular extraterritorial claims (Morley and McGillion 2002, 52-113). Business leaders and foreign governments found the Helms-Burton bill even more offensive than the Cuban Democracy Act. They considered it an infringement of their sovereignty and trading rights and a violation of GATT and WTO principles.

Clinton backed the Helms-Burton bill, despite business and foreign government opposition, after planes flown by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue were shot down by the Cuban military over the Florida Straits in February 1996. Cuba's action stirred emigre fury in Florida. With most Miami Cuban Americans expressing support for the Helms-




Burton bill (FIU-IPOR 1997), Clinton reversed his stance on the legislation in the context of the heightened anti-Castro fervor in an election year. He, like Bush, signed the legislation in Florida. He timed it to coin- cide with the opening of the political primary contest in the state (Morley and McGillion 2002, 105) and invited influential Cuban Ameri- cans to the signing ceremony (Schoultz 2009, chap. 13). Clinton's approval of the legislation helped him garner about a third of the Cuban American Florida vote that November, insufficient to break the Republi- cans' lock on the state's Cuban American electoral bloc but sufficient to win the state's electoral college votes and his presidential re-election bid in turn. A Democratic candidate had not won Florida in 20 years.

In his memoir, Clinton acknowledged that his support for the bill was good election-year politics in Florida but that it undermined what- ever chance he might have had in a second term to lift the embargo in exchange for changes on the island (Clinton 2004, 701, 727). The Helms-Burton bill, among its measures, restricted presidential authority to lift the embargo without congressional approval. Having considered Florida critical to his re-election bid, Clinton had worked for four years to cultivate support in the state, including among Cuban Americans. Although Clinton had an interest in making improved U.S.-Cuba bilateral relations and changes in Cuba a hallmark of his presidency, when pressed to choose, he prioritized his re-election.

As a further revelation that his support for the 1996 legislation was electorally driven, after winning a second term, Clinton never enforced the Helms-Burton provision that foreign governments and investors found especially egregious: the clause that gave U.S. citizens the right to sue international investors who "trafficked" in property they had owned before the revolution. But the very enactment of the legislation, with its extraterritorial reach, so angered the international community that country votes in the United Nations General Assembly to condemn the embargo subsequently increased. The United States paid an international price for passing legislation it never enforced.13 What was good for winning an election proved bad for U.S. foreign relations.

Clinton also never honored the Helms-Burton prerequisites for rein- stating family visitation and remittance-sending rights. Following his re- election, he lifted personal embargo restrictions, even though the political and economic changes in Cuba specified in the 1996 legislation had not transpired. He asserted that people-to-people ties might lay ground- work for improved bilateral relations. Clinton, in essence, did what Tufte argues that incumbents do once electoral dust settles: reverse policies they promoted to win votes that conflict with concerns of state.

The 2000 election raised new issues for the ethnic policy cycle. It did not result in new embargo-tightening measures. To the contrary; that year, before the election, Clinton signed into law the legislation that




allowed U.S. food sales to Cuba. Agribusiness, with interests in numer- ous farm states, had been lobbying to lift export barriers since the early 1990s, to expand market opportunities (Castro 2008, 22; Schoultz 2009, chap. 13; LeoGrande 2005, 9). Clinton supported loosening the embargo in an election year, when he faced more moneyed and influential lobbyists than Cuban Americans, and when not running for re-election, so that concern with the Florida vote did not take center stage.

While Cuban American lobbyists thereby suffered their first major post-Cold War foreign policy legislative defeat, their consolation prize was the insertion in the trade bill of a requirement that Cuba pay cash for purchases. The Cuban American National Foundation leadership presumed that the fiscally impoverished island government could afford little that was not bought on credit. It was also in 2000 that Cuban Amer- ican lobbyists succeeded in getting Congress to legislate the once-a-year cap on visits, at a time when congressional momentum mounted for lifting travel restrictions for all Americans, not merely for Cuban Americans with island relatives.

More important to the 2000 ethnic electoral cycle was the controversy over whether

Eli.n Gonztlez should stay in the United States or

be returned to his father in Cuba. The controversy revealed the political price a presidential candidate incurred by defying Cuban American yearnings. That year Cuban Americans helped George W. Bush win the electoral college vote, with Florida decisive to the election outcome. Officially, Bush won the state by slightly more than five hundred votes, with over 80 percent of Cuban Americans backing him.

The 2000 ethnic electoral policy cycle rested, above all, on Cuban American opposition to President Clinton's intervention to honor parental custody rights and return Eliin to his father in Cuba. Seventy- nine percent of Miami Cuban Americans felt that Eliin should remain in the United States with Miami relatives (FIU-IPOR 2000). The Cuban American National Foundation, while still the preeminent Cuban Amer- ican organization, financed Eliin's Florida relatives' fight for claims to the boy.

Eliin innocently contributed to Bush's exceptionally strong support among Cuban Americans that year. Despite the community's tendency to vote as a bloc, never before had it used the ballot box in such large numbers, in such unity, and in a Florida election won by so few votes. Cuban Americans collectively turned against Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee. Gore, who had been Clinton's vice president, was damned by association with the Clinton White House, even though he very publicly had sided with Eliin's Miami relatives.14 In his memoir, Clinton acknowledged Gore's stance to be understandable, given the importance of Florida in the election (2004, 905). Outrage at the Clinton administration's handling of the Eliin case was so strong, however, that




Gore did not dare campaign in Cuban American neighborhoods for fear of facing protests (Flores et al. forthcoming). Gore's experience reveals that when incumbent presidents implement policies unpopular among key constituencies, even a vice president running for the highest office may pay a price at the polls.

Cuban Americans were so enraged with the Clinton administration's sequestering of Elifin to return him to Cuba that they defended Bush when his victory was disputed. They intimidated the local officials in charge of the recount to the point of helping to shut down the effort to validate the vote (Finnegan 2004, 70).

When he ran for re-election in 2004, after the Elidn affair had been put to rest, Bush's support among Cuban Americans in Florida dropped from 82 to 77 percent (Flores et al. forthcoming). Even to exact that level of support, Bush, pressured by the CLC as well as by Florida Cuban American politicians, acceded to tightening the personal embargo (see Eckstein 2009, chap. 3). As backdrop and rationale for stepping up travel and remittance restrictions in 2004, Bush used his discretionary power to commission a report, prepared by the Commission for Assis- tance to a Free Cuba (U.S. Department of State-CAFC 2004). The report called for tightening the personal embargo to help hasten island regime change.15 Bush invited high-ranking Cuban Americans to be present when he gave speeches addressing the personal embargo.16

Incumbent president embargo loosening, and resistance to embargo tightening, in nonelection years further suggests that the ethnic policy cycle was electorally driven. Both Clinton and George W. Bush expanded Cuban American cross-border visitation and remittance-sending rights in nonelection years and retracted them in election years. When not running for office, these presidents were less accommodating to Cuban American hardliner wishes and more responsive to bipartisan congressional voices (and business and humanitarian interests) favoring relaxation of travel restrictions (Schoultz 2009, chap. 13; LeoGrande 2005, 36-44). In nonelection years they also were more willing to respect U.S. commitments to freedom of travel and to family values.

Between 1992 and 2004, one instance of personal embargo tightening occurred in a presidential election off-year. In 1994, Clinton restricted travel and remittance sending to instances of "extreme hardship" and "extreme humanitarian need," on a case-by-case basis. He did so in the context of an immigration crisis (Masud-Piloto 1996). That year, Fidel Castro allowed tens of thousands of Cubans to leave the island without U.S. entry permission. Clinton initially refused them admission. Cuban Americans, however, believing that Cubans fleeing Castro were entitled to special immigration rights, turned in outrage on the President. Against this backdrop, Clinton accommodated a request by Mas Canosa to tighten the personal embargo. In exchange, the influ-




ential Cuban American agreed not to oppose a new U.S. policy of returning to the island Cubans found at sea trying to immigrate without entry permits. Since 1966, Washington had extended immigration rights to Cubans picked up in the Florida Straits.17 In his memoir, Clinton admitted that he already had his 1996 re-election bid in mind when making the deal with Mas Canosa (2004, 615).

In 1996, Clinton also supported tightening the embargo during the bilateral crisis fueled by the downing of the planes flown by Brothers to the Rescue. In that instance, however, he did so in the heat of his re- election bid and with the Florida vote unequivocally in mind.

Thus, although flare-ups in bilateral tensions induced the President to tighten the embargo both in 1994 and 1996, re-election considerations shaped responses in both instances. It is noteworthy that the embargo tightening tied to electoral opportunism punished Cuban Americans who wished to visit and share earnings with family in Cuba for "sins of state." Hardline Cuban Americans influenced how Clinton responded to the bilateral crises.18

BREAKDOWN OF THE ETHNIC POLICY CYCLE

If political donations backed by lobbying, and vote delivery in a key electoral state, serve as bedrock for the ethnic policy cycle, without them the policy cycle might be expected to end. Cuban American PAC contributions continued to come in, and Cuban Americans remained critical to the Florida vote and Florida critical to the national election. But by 2008, the political context had changed. Ordinary Cuban Amer- icans became increasingly divided in the policies they coveted, and influential Cuban Americans ceased to speak in a single voice to leverage votes for ethnic gain (Castro 2007). At the same time, in 2008, no presidential candidate ran as an incumbent, with recourse to the highest office to implement vote-getting policies; the incumbent vice president was not a presidential contender; and momentum built up among legislators, Cuban Americans aside, to lift travel restrictions for all Americans, as well as to end economic sanctions against Cuba (Sweig 2007).1" Against this backdrop, presidential candidates focused more on whether to maintain or loosen Bush's restrictions than on embargo tightening.

Miami survey data show that Cuban Americans differ increasingly in their stance toward the personal embargo, toward continuing the basic embargo, and toward selling medicine and especially food to Cuba, as well as toward reestablishing diplomatic ties and dialogue with the Cuban government. They differ depending, first and foremost, on when they emigrated. The so-called New Cubans, post-Soviet era arrivals, contrast markedly in their views with earlier emigres (see table 2), espe-




cially with those who first fled the revolution, between 1959 and 1964. Known as the exiles, the first post-Castro emigres form the core of the Cuban American immigrant political class, and especially of political contributors and lobbyists (Eckstein 2009, chap. 3).

The varying views of Cubans who were uprooted in different time periods can be traced to their different experiences when they lived on the island. The revolution was the defining experience of the first islanders who fled Castro's rule, and a politically negative experience at that (Pedraza 2007; Eckstein 2009, chap. 1). It continued to shape their views on Cuban matters even after they had lived for decades in the United States. Most of these self-defined exiles supported the embargo on principle, even while recognizing it to be ineffective. For them, the embargo symbolized continued commitment to their battle with Castro, which they refused to put to rest, even with the transition of rule from Fidel to his brother, Raul.

More recent arrivals, in contrast, were children of the revolution, and their defining experience was the traumatic economic crisis caused by the abrupt ending of Soviet aid and trade. Emigrating, as a consequence, often for economic reasons (Eckstein 2009, appendix), to improve their own lot and, through remittances, the lot of family they left behind, they wished to retain ties with Cubans on the island.20 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, they accounted for about one-fourth of the island- born in the United States, outnumbering the exile core, those who emigrated between 1959 and 1964 (Eckstein 2009, table 1.3).

On the personal embargo, the emigrf waves are especially divided. In Miami in 2007, on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, approximately three-fourths of the New Cubans (including 80 percent of the 1995-2007 emigres) favored unrestricted travel rights, approximately the same number among the first emigres that favored restrictions (table 2).21 Most other Soviet-era arrivals also favored limits to travel.

With contrasting views toward the personal embargo, the emigrf cohorts also differ in their views on Bush's 2004 tightening of travel and remittance-sending restrictions. Distinguishing only between pre- and post-1980 emigrfs, Bendixen and Associates found, in their 2006 Miami- Dade and Broward County survey, that 63 percent of pre-1980 emigrfs approved, while almost the same percent (55) of 1980s and later arrivals disapproved, of Bush's clampdown on people-to-people cross-border rights (Bendixen and Associates 2006). Differentiating years of arrival in more detail, FIU-IPOR found in its 2007 Miami survey that more than twice as many New Cubans as exiles favored a return to pre-2004 policies (see table 2).

Although the emigrf cohort divide was already in the making at the time of the 2004 election, Bush, running for re-election as an incumbent, used his discretionary power to tighten the personal embargo to




accommodate political pressure from the CLC and other pro-embargo- tightening exile groups, political contributors, and South Florida Cuban American politicians. At the time, the New Cubans were not organized as a force unto themselves, and the remains of the Foundation and other groups that favored loosening the personal embargo were too weak to advocate effectively.

When tightening the personal embargo in 2004, Bush undoubtedly understood where his votes would come from. Only 31 percent of registered voters were affected by his tightening of the personal embargo, compared to 57 percent of unregistered voters (FIU-IPOR 2007). Most Soviet-era emigres were U.S. citizens and therefore likely to vote, whereas only one-fourth of New Cubans were U.S. citizens (table 1). Politically active Soviet-era emigres who advocated tightening the personal embargo were indifferent to the impact of the clampdown on recent arrivals.

While only a minority of New Cubans were positioned to use the ballot to oppose Bush's cutback in travel and remittance-sending rights, they did not all passively acquiesce to it. Hundreds of post-Soviet-era emigres picketed the offices of the Cuban American legislators, whom they blamed for the new restrictions (Wall Street Journal 2004). In particular, Bush reportedly consulted Lincoln Diaz-Balart, one of the three hardline Cuban American South Florida congressional representatives, on Cuba policy (New YorkE Times 2006). The 2004 FIU-IPOR survey that found most Miami Cuban Americans to believe that their legislators represented them well on Cuban matters was conducted before Bush's 2004 regulations went into effect.

By 2008, an incipient generational divide also was in the making, between those born in Cuba and those born in the United States. By then, about half of all Cuban Americans were U.S.-born. On foreign policy views, U.S.-born Cuban Americans most resembled New Cubans (see table 2). However, the two constituencies differed in their reasons for supporting the same policies. The New Cubans' views were shaped by their continued commitment to friends and family on the island. In contrast, the views of the U.S.-born were shaped by their U.S. upbringing. They were schooled in U.S. values of compromise and tolerance, even if, at home, their exile parents socialized them to a hardline stance on Cuba under Castro.

The disputes over policy that fueled the CLC's 2001 split from the Foundation were, at their core, generation-based. Second-generation Cuban Americans, who dominated the faction that remained affiliated with the Foundation, remained committed to their parents' battle with Castro, but they favored a more conciliatory approach to dealing with Cuba that was consistent with their U.S. upbringing.22

Also in 2004, a partisan divide began to simmer at the leadership level for the first time since Republicans had consolidated their hold




over the Cuban American electorate. By 2008, this divide had deepened. In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, Joe Garcia left his post as executive director of the Foundation to join the New Democratic Net- work, an organization formed to recruit, promote, and fund candidates to prepare a new generation of Democrats. Four years later, he ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket. Also that year, Rail Martinez, the longtime mayor of Hialeah, who had been a Democrat since the days before Cuban Americans became entrenched in the Republican Party, also ran for Congress. The two of them contested the congressional seats of Mario and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, respectively. This marked the first time that Cuban American Republican representatives had faced serious electoral challenges, much less from fellow Cuban Americans. Although the challengers lost, the two Democratic candidates appealed to the Cuban American "generation gap" by focusing less on Raui and Fidel Castro and more on ending Bush's 2004 restrictions, as well as on domestic issues (Nooruddin 2008). Two-thirds of the U.S.-born Cuban Americans, all, by definition, U.S. citizens and therefore eligible to vote if of age, disapproved of Bush's 2004 tightening of the personal embargo (table 2).

Against this growing divide in views among the electorate and the breakdown of hardliner hegemony at the leadership level, a presidential candidate spoke out for the first time for loosening the personal embargo in 2008. While John McCain, the Republican candidate, made public his support for continuing Bush's policies, Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, announced that he would lift Bush administration restrictions to allow Cuban Americans to visit their relatives more fre- quently and to send more remittances if they so desired. Obama argued that Bush's policies left Cubans too dependent on the Castro-led regime and too removed from the transformative message that Cuban Ameri- cans carry (Associated Press 2007). The CLC, and the PAC associated with it, sided with McCain. Obama, in contrast, refused PAC money, and therefore was not beholden to moneyed Cuban Americans committed to the personal embargo. Under the circumstances, he took the political risk of alienating the most hardline, unlikely Democratic voters in the November election, irrespective of his stance, while appealing to the U.S.-born and New Cubans registered to vote. At the time, one-half of registered Cuban American voters, though only one-third of the first emigre cohort, favored a return to the travel and remittance policies in place before Bush's 2004 crackdown (FIU-IPOR 2007).

CONCLUSIONS

Under certain conditions, the presidential electoral cycle may give rise to an ethnic policy cycle. This was true in the Cuban American case




between 1992 and 2004. The electoral basis for the ethnic cycle is sim- ilar to that of the political economic policy cycle elucidated by Tufte. Tufte, however, left unaddressed the "behind the scenes" impact that moneyed, organized interests may have in influencing both policy and voter preferences.

The ethnic cycle from 1992 to 2004 rested on policy variance in presidential election and nonelection years. In election years, incumbent presidents who sought to retain office implemented policies that ethnic lobbyists pressed for, which helped to win votes. When the policies conflicted with concerns of governance, in nonelection years presidents reversed election-year measures or left them unenforced. In nonelection years, presidents also were more likely to take nonelectoral considerations into account in their policymaking.

Viewed from the vantage point of an ethnic group with money, con- nections, and organizational assets, plus a political agenda and votes to deliver, presidential elections provide an opportunity to influence national policy. Cuban American lobbyists and PAC contributors benefited especially from their ethnic group's demographic concentration in the largest "swing" state and their high voter turnout. They were especially effective when not challenged by more moneyed, better-organized, multistate-based business interests.

Although the aforementioned conditions were conducive to the formation of an ethnic policy cycle, the outcome was not inevitable. How presidents used their discretionary power was not predetermined, and their interventions transpired amid changing circumstances, including bilateral crises. Yet even in the face of bilateral tensions, the underlying dynamics and logic of the ethnic electoral policy cycle influenced presidential responses. President Clinton, in particular, responded to intergov- ernmental tensions by tightening the embargo in ways that were unre- lated to the crises at hand but consonant with the wants of influential Cuban Americans well positioned to shape policy. The influential Cuban Americans had emigrated in the first years of Castro's rule. They perceived themselves as exiles and coveted a barrier across the Florida Straits as

impermeable as possible. Innocent post-Soviet-era emigres, without money, organization, or votes to parlay, who wished to bond and share income across borders, paid the greatest price, under the circumstances, for the Cuban government's wrongdoing that fueled the bilateral feuds.

Reversal and nonenforcement of politically driven ethnic policies in nonelection years point to short-term election concerns that may conflict with longer-term concerns of governance. Even if they are never enforced, however, policies initiated to win ethnic votes may alienate other key constituencies. From a state institutional vantage point, an ethnic policy cycle premised on special interests may generate undesir- able consequences that prove difficult to reverse.




The Cuban American experience also suggests that an ethnic policy cycle may not endure if the conditions that contributed to its formation dissipate. If the ethnic leadership, and the ethnic electorate in whose name they claim to speak, become divided in what they want, the bedrock for a policy cycle may shatter. Cuban American influence remained important in the 2008 election, but that year, for the first time, U.S. Cuba policy became contested terrain; and the debate shifted from maintaining the status quo to loosening the embargo. Embargo tightening was off the political radar screen. That no presidential candidate ran as an incumbent and one contestant refused PAC money and therefore was not beholden to special ethnic interests also worked against a refu- eling of the ethnic policy cycle. How Obama, as President, responds to the incipient shift in ethnic dynamics remains to be seen.

NOTES

I am grateful to Paul Hare, Michael Shifter, and Graham Wilson for com- ments on an earlier version of this article. I wish also to thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the American Council on Learned Soci- eties for financial support.

1. Antipathy to communism influenced U.S. policymakers during the Cold War and afterward. As this article documents, however, aversion to communism in itself cannot explain why U.S. Cuba policy shifted over the years while Cuba remained under communist rule, and why U.S. policymakers tightened the embargo of Cuba while lifting embargoes of China and Vietnam. Strong anticommunist sentiment helped legitimate Cuba embargo tightening, especially in election years, when Cuban American political influence peaked. The stance on Cuba of certain individual legislators remained nonetheless consistently driven by antipathy to communism during the entire period under study. The compar- ison with U.S. China and Vietnam policy reveals that when economic and ide- ological interests conflict, economic interests tend to win out, if national security concerns are not at stake. U.S. business lobbied for access to the two Asian markets, just as U.S. farmers successfully lobbied for access to the (smaller) Cuban market after the Cold War.

2. Presidents, as part of the "bargain," also appointed prominent Cuban Americans to key administrative posts.

3. This article focuses primarily on the years 1992-2004, when Fidel Castro served as head of state. Ilis brother, Raul, replaced him temporarily in 2006 and permanently in 2008.

4. See Werlau 2003 for an excellent summary of the evolution of U.S. travel policy.

5. The Cuban Democracy Act also called for the prohibition of U.S. business trade with Cuba through third countries, the banning of ships that landed in Cuba from U.S. ports for six months, and the withholding of U.S. aid to countries that traded with Cuba. These measures were designed to give third countries disincentives to engage in business dealings with Cuba under Castro.




6. There was one period of exception, under President Jimmy Carter, when 150,000 Cuban Americans were permitted to visit family in Cuba (Eckstein and Barberia 2002, 814).

7. The legislation also granted U.S. citizens permission to sue foreign investors trafficking in property to which they laid prerevolutionary claims, and denied foreign investors U.S. entry rights.

8. The Bush administration, at the same time, clamped down on other than family travel, such as trips by educational groups, which Clinton had permitted. Bush introduced the new travel measures in March 2003 after the Cuban government arrested scores of dissidents the month before.

9. Unless otherwise indicated, the discussion of Cuban American PACs draws on the multitude of superb data prepared by the Center for Responsive Politics.

10. "Baseball diplomacy" involved an exchange of games between the Cuban All Stars and the Baltimore Orioles in Cuba and the United States to promote cross-border goodwill. After failing to prevent the games, Menandez helped organize opposition at the U.S. stadium.

11. This suggests that the ethnic lobby was most successful when not facing a powerful opponent to the policies it advocated.

12. Unless otherwise indicated, information on the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC and the CLC comes from their respective websites. See U.S.-Cuba Democ- racy PAC (n.d.) and Cuban Liberty Council (n.d.).

13. The percentage of countries that condemned U.S. Cuba economic sanctions rose from 33 in 1992 to 73 after the Helms-Burton bill went into effect, and then to 88 in 2001 (Dominguez 2008, 206).

14. While Gore could distance himself from the 2000 legislation that exempted farm exports from the embargo, Eliin became such a heated Cuban American controversy that the vice president believed that neutrality on, and indifference to, the issue would cost him the Florida vote. Because it is highly unusual for a vice president to disagree publicly with the president he serves, Gore is unlikely to have broken with the President had he not been campaign- ing for the presidency at the time, no matter what he privately thought.

15. The report, as well as one issued in 2006, also called for prodemocracy and civil society building in Cuba. In this context, the U.S. Agency for Interna- tional Development channeled tens of millions of dollars to Florida-based groups. See USGAO 2006, esp. table 9, p. 50.

16. This was true already when Bush announced the formation of the commission in October 2003.

17. According to the 1995 agreement, the United States continued to grant Cubans who touched U.S. soil (with "dry feet") the right to stay, in accordance with the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, but called for the return to Cuba of Cubans found in the Straits (with "wet feet"), attempting to emigrate without entry permission. Cuban American lobbyists failed to block implementation of the new "wet foot" policy (Dominguez 2006).

18. Aside from the rafter crisis and the shooting down of planes flown by Brothers to the Rescue, U.S. Cuba policy was influenced by other developments in Cuba that had less direct impact on travel and remittance policy. These developments included Castro's arrest of affiliates of Concilio Cubano, a




coalition of island opposition groups planning a national meeting in February 1996; and his arrest and imprisonment of scores of dissidents in March 2003. Yet Bush relaxed the personal embargo in 2003 immediately after the crackdown on dissidents (when concomitantly closing loopholes on the rights of other Americans to travel to Cuba). Although the House, in September, and the Senate, in October 2003, voted overwhelmingly to ease travel restrictions and enforcement, the initiatives garnered less support than in 2002. The diminished congressional support, against the backdrop of the dissident crackdown, cre- ated a context in which Bush could more easily appeal to Cuban American hardliners and tighten the Cuban American people-to-people embargo as the 2004 election neared.

19. While momentum built up in Congress for partial lifting of the embargo, including travel restrictions, a core of legislators remained loyal to maintaining it. Bush allied with these legislators, many of whom were recipients of PAC funds and some of whom, as noted, became more supportive of embargo tightening after receiving those funds. An illustration of the congressional momentum was that a majority of both parties in both chambers voted to relax travel restrictions by refusing to approve Treasury funds to enforce cross-border visitation regulations. Nevertheless, in light of the differences between the House and Senate ver- sions of the proposed policy shift, the Republican majority leader, backed by the White House, blocked passage of the travel-related initiative.

20. On differences between pre- and post-Soviet era emigres, see Castro 2007; Grenier and P6rez 2003; LeoGrande 2005, 16; Pedraza 2007; Perez 2001; Portes and Shafer 2007; see also Eckstein 2009, chap. 1.

21. Although FIU-IPOR included 1985-89 emigres in the same wave as post-Soviet-era arrivals in its 2000 and 2004 surveys, few Cubans (and few in the FIU-IPOR surveys) moved to the United States in the latter 1980s.

22. The Foundation was not alone, organizationally, in coming to speak out against the personal embargo and for cross-border bridge building (LeoGrande 2005; Castro 2007). It joined a new coalition, Consenso Cubano, which pressed for removing Cuban American travel restrictions. Not all groups in the coalition, however, were second-generation-based. Members of the influential Cuba Study Group in the coalition, for example, were wealthy business- people who had emigrated when young, during the first years of Castro's rule.

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Documents

The cuban ethnic electoral policy cycle.pdf