wfn.org | Partner Churches Respond to Helms-Burton Act

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1-Aug.-1996 
 
96282      Partner Churches Respond to Helms-Burton Act 
 
                          by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky.--A decision by President Bill Clinton to allow U.S. 
citizens to sue foreign companies profiting from investment in properties 
confiscated by the Castro government -- but to suspend the filing of those 
lawsuits for six months -- is drawing everything from faint hope to strong 
wrath from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s partners in Canada, Mexico 
and other Latin American countries. 
 
     In fact, a group of Cuban Presbyterians in Miami is one of the few 
coalitions of Christians with much good to say about Congress' goal of 
economically isolating Fidel Castro further by threatening legal action 
against Cuba's trading partners and seizing their U.S. assets as 
settlements. 
 
     The core of the Helms-Burton Act, Title III, allows current U.S. 
citizens to bring suit in federal courts here against the Cuban government 
or against foreign companies investing in property that U.S.  citizens have 
claimed since 1959.  It was developed after Cuban fighter planes shot down 
two U.S.  civilian aircraft off Cuba's coast last February. 
 
     But while the European Union and the Canadian and Mexican governments 
are balking at attempts to impose domestic law internationally, church 
partners are responding to Clinton's decision differently. "Christendom in 
Canada," as described by one Canadian Presbyterian, is signing up unions, 
churches and development organizations to call for a tourist boycott of 
Florida to pressure officials there to push the president to relent, while 
churches in other nations are hoping the suspension will simply be 
reinstated when the six months are up. 
 
     "We Canadians like going to Florida.  We spent $1.3 billion in Florida 
last year. ... We'd like to go to Florida again this year.  But unless 
Clinton waives the Helms-Burton law, we'll change our plans," said Marjorie 
Ross, the Presbyterian Church of Canada's (PCC) partnership liaison with 
the Presbyterian Reformed Church in Cuba (PRCC), who was loosely 
paraphrasing language in a press release from Oxfam/Canada, a developmental 
agency, pushing the boycott.  She added, "Boy, this really makes people 
mad." 
 
     Canadians intend to go through with the boycott -- despite the 
six-month suspension -- since the overall act already has gone into effect. 
The Presbyterian Church of Canada has signed on. 
 
     What gripes Canadians -- and Mexicans -- most are what they call 
bullying tactics behind the bill, which they say will only harm the weakest 
in Cuba's already failing economy, and the double standard the U.S. applies 
only to Cuba's kind of communism.  "Our focus," says the PCC's Lee 
McKenna-duCharme, "is the well-being of the people of Cuba. 
 
     "This deepens the embargo and puts a chill effect on investment," she 
said, pointing out that the U.S. feels comfortable calling trade with 
communist China "engagement." She calls the language change a hypocritical 
inconsistency that conveniently opens a billion-person Chinese market for 
U.S. goods. 
 
     The Rev. Abner Lopez of the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico 
says his country's evangelical churches worry about double talk in the 
U.S.'s relationship with Cuba.  The U.S. has backed dictators in other 
countries, yet it remains ferocious about bringing Castro down -- while 
continuing to impose cruel measures on Cuba's people. 
 
     "The people of every country should be able to make their own 
decisions," Lopez told the Presbyterian News Service, without holding back 
his discomfort with the resolve of Cuba's communist government.  "But [like 
Mexico's president, Ernesto Zedillo], we consider it interventionist when 
one country makes laws that affect another country. ... 
 
     "I see the six-month wait as good," Lopez said, hoping for 
reconsideration of the measure. "There's time for Americans to think more 
before they actually do [this]." 
 
     Retired minister Martin A¤orga of Miami, who was pastor of the First 
Spanish Presbyterian Church there for 28 years, says Cuban-Americans view 
the wait with some anxiety, conscious that the president's political 
manuevering allows him to say during his reelection campaign that he backs 
cracking down on Castro while suspending actual action on Title III of the 
bill. 
 
     "But at this moment," A¤orga said, "the only thing we can do is wait. 
 ... After that, we'll decide what we're going to do.  If he signs the law, 
we'll give him our support. 
 
     "If not, we'll find other means " he said, saying that civil 
disobedience is not out of the question in Miami's Cuban community. "It's a 
good law," argues A¤orga, who said Cuban-Americans are motivated by 
injustice here, not by financial settlements any lawsuits might render, 
since the Internal Revenue Service already allows Cubans to deduct lost 
revenue from abandoned businesses.  
 
     "Castro nationalized businesses that belonged to American people ... 
and never paid compensation.  Now he's selling those properties to people 
who want to invest -- the same property Castro took from the owners without 
compensation," A¤orga said, insisting that Cuba's prerevolutionary 
telephone and gas companies, as well as some sugar mills, were U.S. owned. 
 
     But it is exactly such old rancor between the U.S. and Cuba that the 
Latin American Council of Churches in Quito, Ecuador, deplores in its March 
letter to both Castro and Clinton.  It condemns both Cuba's extremism in 
February's plane shootings and repeated U.S. violations of international 
law, i.e., provisions within the Helms-Burton Act and the allowance of 
aircraft with hostile purposes to travel to Cuba from the U.S. 
 
     The letter, signed by the council's president, the Rev. Walter 
Altmann, says, "Our interest in addressing you these lines, your 
Excellencies, is not to emit a technical judgment we are not qualified for, 
nor a political one, which belongs to other bodies, but to respectfully and 
fraternally call on both parts, so that wisdom and good will override 
passion, and electoral or political interests." 
 
     A spokesperson for the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) in 
Geneva -- which has eight member churches in the U.S., including the 
PC(U.S.A.), and one member church in Cuba, the PRCC -- was much more blunt. 
      
     "From outside the U.S.A., the Helms-Burton Act looks like the latest 
attempt by a superpower to bludgeon a small and impoverished island into 
submission, and President Clinton's ambivalent attitude looks like a 
calculated attempt to woo Cuban-American voters," the spokesperson said. 
"We don't think this is the way to conduct foreign policy. 
 
     "For 36 years, successive U.S. administrations have tried to bring 
down the Castro government by economic means.  It hasn't worked.  If 
anything, it has probably delayed changes toward greater pluralism and 
democracy in Cuba.  We find it very hard to understand," he concluded, "why 
the U.S.A.  is still fighting a cold war against Cuba, when everywhere else 
the cold war has been officially declared over." 
 
     According to the Rev. Oden Marichal, president of the Cuban Council of 
Churches in Havana, the U.S.'s hard line is only damaging its own 
international credibility by trying to force American law on businesses' 
operations overseas -- and it is only strengthening Cuban patriotism. 
 
     "People are feeling more Cuban now than before," he told the 
Presbyterian News Service, adding that Cubans have heard some countries are 
lining up countersuits if Title III is enacted.  He's heard, for instance, 
that some Canadians intend to sue for property lost during the American 
Revolution. 
 
     The PC(USA) was among the U.S. churches urging the president to 
suspend implementation of Title III. 
      
     Similar legislation imposing sanctions on individuals or foreign 
companies investing heavily in Iran or Libya passed Congress July 23 -- 
despite threats of retaliation by countries doing business in Libya and 
Iran. 

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