An amendment backed by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress codifies into federal law the existing Treasury Department regulations preventing the large majority of U.S. residents from traveling to Cuba. The rider purports to be a humanitarian gesture to ease trade restrictions on food and medicine. In fact, by singling out Cuba to deny it any U.S. government or commercial credit to purchase these items, it continues to punish the Cuban people for their unrelenting resistance to Washington's determination to destroy the example set by the first free territory of the Americas.

The Clinton administration's announcement that it will sign this legislation is consistent with its eight-year record not only of tightening its brutal squeeze on the Cuban people but also pressing forward its assault on the rights and social conditions of workers and farmers. Working people in the United States who are increasingly resisting the economic and social conditions being imposed on them by the capitalist rulers are increasingly open to the need for human solidarity with workers and farmers the world over confronting attacks by the same propertied interests who rule this country.

The Socialist Workers campaign demands the immediate extension of federally-funded cheap credit to all working farmers, and a halt to all foreclosures on their land and equipment. We demand that the U.S. government immediately end its economic warfare against Cuba and its ban on travel there, with no conditions.  
 
 
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