Cuban whipping boy.

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Just days before the Cuban government shot down two private American Cessna planes flown by an anti-Castro group, the United States was tidying up a much larger catastrophe in the air, one that our own armed forces had created.

On July 3, 1988, the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down a civilian Iran Air Airbus jet over the Persian Gulf. All 290 people aboard were killed.

The Iranian jet was not invading U.S. air space; the Cessna planes were invading Cuba's.

The Iranian jet was not dropping leaflets on the United States, urging American citizens to overthrow the government; the Cessna planes had previously dropped leaflets urging Cubans to "fight for your rights."

The Iranian jet had not been warned by American air-traffic controllers to change course; the Cessnas had been warned by Cuban air-traffic controllers.

The United States has condemned Cuba in the strongest terms for shooting down the Cessnas. At the same time, the United States continues to defend to this day the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus, claiming that the Vincennes was taking "appropriate defensive measures." (To get the matter settled, however, the United States agreed to pay off the families of the Iranian victims.)

The double standard couldn't be more obvious. Nor could the continuing foolishness of U.S. policy toward Cuba.

For thirty-seven years, the U.S. government has been trying to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro instead of respecting its right to self-determination. But the economic embargo, the Bay of Pigs invasion, exploding cigars, fluttering leaflets, and Radio Marti have not succeeded in bringing down Castro. The only thing the U.S. government has accomplished is to make life miserable for the people of Cuba.

Now Clinton wants to make it even more miserable. He is catering to the rightwing Cuban Americans who have dominated U.S. policy toward Havana since the revolution, the very rightwing Cuban Americans who were behind the group called Brothers to the Rescue, which made the Cessna flights.

These were private taunting missions at best, and CIA destabilizing missions at worst, as a former member of the Brothers, who defected to Cuba, now alleges with some justification. The head of the Brothers, after all, was a veteran of the CIA's Bay of Pigs operation.

After the Brothers repeatedly violated Cuban air space, the Cuban government protested to Washington, and put it on notice that Cuba would take "all necessary steps" to halt the planes, including shooting them down. But Washington failed to stop the flights, and the group continued its provocations.

The Brothers knew what they were getting into. The New York Times reported that last summer the group's founder had warned one of his pilots that if the Cubans tried to force their plane to land, the Brothers would not obey the warnings. That pilot was one of the four who died when the Cubans shot down the Cessnas in February.

Minutes before the plane was shot down, the Cuban air tower warned the pilots. "We are aware of the danger [of continuing toward Cuban air space], but we're going to do it as free Cubans," the pilots answered back.

"I'm sure the Brothers tried to provoke some kind of incident to impede any further improvement in U.S.-Cuban relations," said Wayne Smith, who ran the U.S. interests section in Havana from 1979 to 1982. "It seems that the U.S. government had really taken very little in the way of appropriate action to prevent them from repeating this kind of thing."

But now it's all Castro's fault. The attack, said Clinton, "was an appalling reminder of the nature of the Cuban regime--repressive, violent, scornful of international law."

Quick to appease the anti-Castro crowd, Clinton quickly reached an agreement with Congress on tightening the economic embargo, going along with punitive legislation sponsored by two troglodytes, Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, and Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana. The legislation is aimed at strangling Cuba's sugar industry, and at preventing the country from obtaining international loans and much-needed hard currency. Clinton also lunged for millions of dollars of frozen Cuban assets to compensate the victims.

Then Clinton ratcheted up the tensions by dispatching warships into the straits of Florida and bombers into the air above. See Bill in mirror flexing muscle.

Even before the downing of the Cessnas, the Clinton Administration was already getting tough on Cuba. The Justice Department was prosecuting Pastors for Peace, a religious group that wanted to send computers to Cuba's hospitals (see "On the Line," Page 15). "For the first time since the Nixon years, the U.S. government is dragging people involved in humanitarian aid before grand juries," says Leonard Weinglass, the Pastors' lawyer.

Cuba is not a threat to the United States, and its human-rights record, while not perfect, is eons ahead of China's or Indonesia's or Guatemala's. You don't see the United States imposing an economic embargo on those countries.

Cuba's function is solely as a whipping boy for U.S. politicians who pander to a rightwing cabal of Cuban exiles centered in Miami, and who create enemies to gain votes.

Our policy toward Cuba is a Cold War relic. It did not serve us well then, nearly bringing on nuclear Armageddon. It certainly doesn't serve us well now.