The dread of refugees.

• Position: U.S. policy vs. Cuba - Editorial

Thirty-five years of foolishness are enough. It's long past time to end the embargo on Cuba. But the topic would not even have come up in Washington had not Fidel Castro allowed more than 20,000 Cubans to try to emigrate to the United States.

Finally, Washington is talking to Havana, though President Clinton insists on keeping off the table the very embargo that precipitated the crisis in the first place. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which subsidized the Cuban economy, the U.S. embargo has been strangling life on that island. The markets are empty, gasoline is scarce, hardship is widespread. It is the draconian suffering imposed by the embargo--and not discontent with Cuba's political system--that is sending many Cubans to the life rafts.

The Cuban government is damned if it lets its citizens emigrate, and it's damned if it stops them. For three decades now, U.S. officials have denounced Castro for not allowing Cubans to leave; now that he lets people go, they denounce him again.

The embargo on Cuba always has been hypocritical. The United States does not have an embargo on China, a communist country with a far worse human-rights record than Cuba's. And the United States does not have an embargo on Indonesia, a U.S. ally with a far worse human-rights record than Cuba's.

But the embargo on Cuba was never about upholding values abroad. It was--and is--about winning votes at home. At the outset, U.S. politicians saw the Cuban embargo as a way to prove their own anticommunist credentials. Breast-beating about Castro was a necessary qualifying event in virtually every race for political office. Now the issue of Cuba remains hot mostly in Florida, which has a powerful right-wing Cuban lobby in Miami.

To a disgraceful extent, U.S. policy toward Cuba has been dictated by Jorge Mas Canosa and his Cuban American National Foundation, which favors the most punitive measures against the island's communist regime. Mas Canosa has delusions about heading a new government in Cuba...