Many of our loyal TBB readers know about the Helms-Burton act, passed in 1996, that stood strong against Fidel Castro. It's been back in the news last week now that the dictator Fidel has stepped down to pass power to his dictator brother, Raul. The Winston-Salem Journal has a good article on the issue. You can also check out Congressman Burton on Hardball discussing it.
From the Winston-Salem Journal:
A 1996 law championed by then-Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C, keeps the United States’ hard-line stance toward Cuba intact until the country has a Democratic government that “does not include Fidel Castro or Raul Castro.”
Policy specialists on Cuba widely expect that Castro’s brother, Raul Castro, will be named president next week.
“It turned out to be sort of prescient, that legislation,” said Roger Noriega, a former foreign-affairs aide to Helms and now a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “It’s clear now that 18 months after Fidel Castro turned over control of the government to his brother ... Raul shows no more interest in opening up (Cuba) than Fidel did.”
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee in the mid-1990s, Helms was perhaps Castro’s most forceful opponent in Washington.
In 1996, he and Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., co-wrote the Helms-Burton Act, which strengthened trade and travel sanctions against Cuba, for the first time penalizing foreign companies that did business with both Cuba and the United States.
The legislation forms the basis for the nation’s current posture toward Cuba. The Bush administration made clear yesterday that the departure of Castro by itself would not lead to the removal of travel or trade bans.
“The changing of the guard is not significant of and by itself,” The Associated Press quoted Tom Casey, a deputy spokesman for State Department, as saying. “The general analysis is that Raul Castro is ‘Fidel lite.’ He is simply a continuation of the Castro regime, of the dictatorship.”
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