Tina Smith: “Mr. President, I rise in very strong support of the amendment offered by the Senator from North Carolina. I am deeply…”

“Mr. President, I rise in very strong support of the amendment offered by the Senator from North Carolina. I am deeply troubled by some of the comments that I have seen in the press yesterday and today in that apparently President Clinton was considering easing the sanctions on the Castro regime. Either the President has been misled or has misread the will of the American people or he continues to get the wrong advice from advisers such as Morton Halperin because in either case this is a grave mistake. The attempts to oust Fidel Castro go back many, many years to the Eisenhower administration. It transcends party, for sure; a number of Presidents in both political parties have been steadfast in their attempts to at least bring this blemish on our hemisphere to an end. Now, when we are just about to cross the finish line, to do anything that would keep that from happening is just a serious mistake. It is not the time to relax our pressure on Fidel Castro. It is time to turn up the heat, not turn it down. The Castro regime as we all know it is morally and economically bankrupt. It has been for over 40 years. Decades of corruption and communism have left the Cuban people disillusioned, left them in poverty, left them yearning, almost begging, crying out for new leadership on that island nation.”