Reprinted from Caribbean Net News
caribbeannetnews.com

US lawmakers head to Cuba after Raul Castro extends olive branch
12-15-2006

WASHINGTON, USA (AFP): Ten lawmakers, believed to be the largest US legislative group to visit communist-ruled Cuba, were to depart for Havana Friday amid rising uncertainty over ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro's health.

"They are leaving on Friday and come back on Sunday. Ten members are going," said Sonia Melendez, spokeswoman for California Democrat Hilda Solis, one of the delegation's members. Among the others are Arizona Republican Jeff Flake and Massachusetts Democrat Bill Delahunt.

The 10 were due to meet with Cuban assembly speaker Ricardo Alarcon, also the top Cuban official for US affairs; Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque; central bank president Francisco Soberon; and Minister of Basic Industry and Communist Party official Yadira Garcia, Cuban sources said.

They will also be greeted by Jaime Ortega, the archbishop of Havana.

The United States and Cuba do not have full diplomatic relations, and Washington has an economic embargo on the only one-party communist state in the Americas.

"We have not many details on the agenda," Solis's spokeswoman added.

But the timing for the visit was potentially interesting.

Fidel Castro, 80, handed over the reins of power on July 31 to his brother Raul Castro, the army chief.

Raul Castro has reached out to the United States more actively than his brother in the past four months, calling for negotiations.

The United States so far has said it is not interested in negotiating until there is a political opening.

Wednesday, the top US diplomat for Latin America indicated that the United States had yet to find a reformer in the communist Cuban government, but did not flatly rule out dialogue with Havana in a context of political opening.

"We have not been able to detect there the emergence of any political figure that could be reformist," said Tom Shannon, the State Department's top diplomat for Latin America.

"Once (Fidel Castro) goes, the successor government is going to have to chart out some kind of path into the future. There are no clear signals of what that path is going to be," Shannon added, noting: "We don't see any significant possibility of change of any kind until Fidel is gone."

Raul Castro, who has been filling in for his brother Fidel since the longtime Cuban president underwent intestinal surgery in July, made an appeal for talks with Washington on December 2 in a speech to troops in Havana honoring Fidel Castro's 80th birthday.

"Our engagement with Cuba has to be part of a change process that facilitates a democratic transition. We are attentive to what is happening in Cuba, to what would happen after Fidel Castro passes from the scene. When we engage, it has to be part of a democratic change," Shannon added.

Fidel Castro has not been seen in public since July 26, the day before his surgery.

With Castro ailing, the US Coast Guard is bracing for a mass migration to US shores from the Caribbean nation, just 144 kilometers (90 miles) across the Florida Straits.

Poring over a map of the region Tuesday ahead of an exercise in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with the positions of a dozen ships marked off by flags, Coast Guard Rear Admiral David Kunkel said they had a clear mission: to stop the exodus.

Adding to the potential for a big influx: US law allows any Cuban who reaches US soil to stay, work and gain residency and expedited US citizenship.

Now, as Cuban defense chief Raul Castro leads Cuba in his brother's absence, the United States fears the controls on migration could fail.

If Cuba at any point allows its people take to the seas, chaos could ensue as some of the 1.25 million Cuban-Americans - two-thirds of whom live in Florida - head there to collect friends and relatives, while others in Cuba try to head for the United States.