Sam Gibbons: “I reluctantly get up here and oppose most of my Florida colleagues and people who I think mean to be right but…”

“I reluctantly get up here and oppose most of my Florida colleagues and people who I think mean to be right but, unfortunately, their solution is wrong. Let me put it in some perspective. If my colleagues had come here 34 years ago, as I was privileged to do, and listened on this floor and in this well, my colleagues would have heard the same speeches made then as we do now. Every day more than half of the 1-minute speeches were devoted to trashing Castro and the Cuban Government, and in that same session of Congress we passed every looney law that one can think of, and most of them are still on the books. In fact, they are all still on the books. I tried to isolate Cuba and tried to bring down Castro through American law. I made those speeches, I voted for those laws, I have come to the conclusion that they were a mistake. What has happened is that we have empowered Castro to make a villain out of the United States, and by villainizing us he has been able to acquire the political clout that he needs to keep the kind of control he has had in Cuba. We would have been far wiser and much more successful had we not isolated Cuba and the Cuban people, and we continued to work with them, to listen to them, to trade with them, and to have commerce with them.”