Early last year, Otto Reich shopped a new project to his boss, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. A Havana-born hard-liner with a habit of picking verbal fights with Cuban President Fidel Castro, Reich believed the United States was unprepared for Castro's fall and needed a transition strategy.
Rice liked the idea. The White House was overwhelmed with preparations for invading Iraq, so she told her new special envoy for Latin America to proceed and promised to pay closer attention after the war. Reich and a close-knit team of State Department political appointees felt they had, at last, an insider's chance to undo Castro.
As Reich's initiative gathered steam, word kept reaching the White House that Cuban Americans in Miami felt that President Bush had broken his promises to challenge Castro more sharply. Worse, Republican political figures warned that Cuban Americans crucial to Bush's 537-vote margin in Florida in 2000 might stay home in 2004.
It was a matter, state Rep. David Rivera said, of "telling the White House we need some help down here. We need something to motivate people."
This confluence of policymaking and politics led to the tightest restrictions on Cuban Americans' interactions with the island in decades: a limit of one visit every three years, a sharp reduction in how much they can spend there and new curbs on the goods they can send. Cuba policy has historically been driven by domestic politics, but this episode -- in accounts given by participants and close observers in Miami and Washington -- offers an exceptional glimpse into how the two interact.
The policy, imposed this summer, prompted a revolt in Congress and angered some of the Cuban Americans it was intended to please; it also produced enough animosity, Democrats hope, to help throw Florida to Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).
Officials said critical political input came from the president's brother Jeb Bush, who is Florida's governor and an avid cultivator of the state's Cuban American population.
State Department officials confirmed that, in a Congress severely divided on how to produce democracy in Cuba, they reached out only to the three Cuban American Republican representatives from South Florida -- all strong proponents of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba.
Assistant Secretary of State Roger F. Noriega, who managed the policy review, said he and his aides had numerous conversations with members of the White House political staff under Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser and a fierce supporter of travel limits. Politics played a "natural" role in shaping the strategy, Noriega said.
"Politics intersect with the policy. In a democracy, it always should," he said. The role of foreign policy experts at the National Security Council, said one participant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, was "as great as, or greater than, the politics shop."
In fact, the opinions of the most hard-line administration figures and some members of the White House political staff dovetailed significantly, even if their ambitions for the policy were different: One was focused on Bush's reelection, the other on Castro's demise.
Defenders of the policy said discussions inside the administration were intense and final decisions were made by Bush. They describe him as convinced that the strategy would wound Castro and energize more voters than it alienated.
Former diplomat Wayne Smith, an opponent of sanctions, said: "I've been involved in U.S.-Cuba policy since 1958. This is the stupidest policy I've ever seen, bar none."
The Plan
The story begins with Reich, a former lobbyist and diplomat. Bush named him assistant secretary of state for Latin America in 2001 after Jeb Bush recommended him and Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) -- a Cuban American hard-liner whose aunt was married to Castro -- appealed to Rove.
