Tom Feeney: “It is an important night tonight, because I find myself in between a fight with two sets of freedom fighters, two groups…”

“It is an important night tonight, because I find myself in between a fight with two sets of freedom fighters, two groups that care deeply about freedom. But the suggestion made by the last speaker, who is a dear friend of mine, that we are interrupting relations between families, in my view, is a little bit like saying that somehow the United States was responsible for a catastrophe visited upon us by Hitler because we refused to give Anne Frank lunch buckets before the Holocaust. My colleagues, there is way too much at stake here to sit back and say that this is a totalitarian regime that we are going to do business with. I have freedom fighters, including the sponsor of this amendment, who is a hero of mine, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Flake), who believes deeply in limited government. He believes deeply in free trade. He believes deeply in the things that make our country and free nations great. But I have to say that the question before us tonight is, are we going to accommodate, will we appease, will we compromise with, will we do business with, will we facilitate, will we provide basic resources to a dictator that has put his own people in jail, under the knife in prison, who has basically undermined every single basic liberty we have ever experienced? Our own State Department has identified, as one of the sixth major exporters of terrorism, the Cuban government. Are we going to recognize that, or are we going to reward that and facilitate that?”