Republican US lawmakers visiting Cuba support new rules to ease sanctions

Republican US lawmakers visiting Cuba will support new rules to ease sanctions on island
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LAST UPDATE: 3/24/2005 5:47:12 PM
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HAVANA (AP) - Saying that American tourism and trade can do more to undermine Fidel Castro's government than current U.S. policy, two conservative U.S. lawmakers promised Thursday to back more legislation this year to ease restrictions against the communist country.

"I don't think that the for the next four years we can maintain this policy," Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., told a small group of international journalists.

"We need to do what we did in Eastern Europe," by putting more Americans in contact with Cubans, said Rep. Wally Herger, of California, another free-trade Republican. "Change will not come from the (Cuba) policies we've had in the past."

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"When you run a play up the middle and it doesn't work, you don't run the same play 45 times," Flake said, applying an American football analogy to the United States' four-decade old policy of trying to isolate the Castro government with trade sanctions and other restrictions.