In late February, 1996, as President Bill Clinton entered the last laps of a tough, though ultimately successful re-election campaign, he was confronted with a Cuban monkey wrench dropped directly into U.S. presidential politics.Up to that point the Clinton administration had indicated its steadfast opposition to the Helms-Burton Act, which aimed at tightening the U.S. Embargo by adding third-country sanctions, strengthening the claims of Cuban-Americans for expropriated property, and transforming what had always been a presidential prerogative into a policy imbued with the force of law. In fact, the bill had been tabled a year earlier in 1995 when Helms faced an intractable Democratic filibuster.
All that changed on the morning of February 24 when Cuban fighter jets shot down two private planes operated by the Miami-based exile group Brothers to the Rescue. While his administration had initially - and correctly - opposed the bill on principle, Clinton quickly reversed course and signed the bill with great fanfare, unwilling to risk losing any Cuban-American votes in the exile-rich swing states of Florida and New Jersey. (See criticism of the Act from Global Exchange and the American Enterprise Institute - a rare case when these two ideological enemies were in strong agreement!)
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