Lateefah Simon: “I concur completely with my colleague from Connecticut. Foreign policy should reflect the national interest, not the…”

“I concur completely with my colleague from Connecticut. Foreign policy should reflect the national interest, not the national passion. Our policy in Cuba reflects the national passion, not the national interest. If the old leaders of the Soviet Union and Cuba had gotten together and said let us try and figure out a United States policy that will keep Castro in power, they could not have figured out a better policy than the policy we have followed that made Castro a hero to his own people, that isolated him. I think we need, if there is such a word, to de-isolate Cuba. I think, for example, we ought to at a minimum sell food and medicine to Cuba. What harm comes to the United States if we sell food and medicine to the people of Cuba? And as I read this amendment, all of a sudden we are saying to countries all over the world, if you do not follow the policy that we and we alone are following--no other country in the world has this policy toward Cuba--if you do not follow our policy, then you are going to have economic reprisal against you. That is not the way. It may have been, immediately after World War II, when we had better than 50 percent of the world's economy, we could muscle our way around like that even though it would not have been good public relations for the cause of freedom and democracy. Today, we are one-fifth of the world's economy. Yes, we are the only superpower that is left, but it just is not rational to follow this kind of policy.”