The Dallas Morning News

HAVANA – As George W. Bush begins his second term calling for an end to tyranny, Cuban officials are bracing for four more years of bruising economic sanctions from an American president they call The Emperor.

“For more than 40 years, all we’ve gotten from the United States is hostility and aggression,” said Miguel Alvarez, an official with the National Assembly, Cuba’s lawmaking body. “U.S. officials don’t believe that their victory in the Cold War will be complete without the fall of the Cuban government.”

American efforts to topple Fidel Castro have cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars over the last decade. Last summer the Bush administration enacted new measures aimed at crippling the Cuban economy. Whether they are working remains a matter of debate.

Castro says it doesn’t matter – the Cuban people won’t surrender to the Americans.

“We are not going to let them hassle us, to try to knock us down. … They will fail, as they always have failed,” the Cuban president said last year after the new policy was announced.

The Bush administration measures are designed mostly to:

Prohibit Cuban-Americans from traveling to the island more than once every three years to visit brothers, sisters, children, parents or grandparents.

Reduce the money and gifts that Cuban-Americans can send to relatives in Cuba.

U.S. officials say the sanctions have proved effective and are expected to deprive the Castro government of at least a half-billion dollars during the first full year. That’s a third of the revenue that Cuba takes in every year in goods sent from abroad, family remittances and family travel, U.S. officials say.

The goal is to “take the cushion out of the regime. It’s hard for them to suck up dollars,” a senior American official said.

“Our intention is not to hurt the Cuban people.”

Cubans, meanwhile, are relying on their proven creativity to get around the rules. Bernardo Alonzo Serafin, a cab driver and mechanic, said he and his relatives have figured out how to get around the measures. They send him money not from the United States but from Mexico, Spain and Canada.

“Some call it globalization,” he said. “We call it survival.”

Before the Bush initiative, his sister from Miami visited twice a year, bringing up to $2,000 per trip, along with clothes, medicine, car parts and shoes.

Now the family has a new system. Relatives whom Serafin had never met are the new “mules,” and they’re planning trips through Mexico.

Other Cuban-Americans who once booked their flights through Miami stream in undetected from Jamaica, Montreal and Freeport, Bahamas.

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