CUBA WILLING TO AID DRUG FIGHT

WASHINGTON - Cuba has shown willingness to help the United States
fight the international drug trade but has been largely ineffective at
it, the Clinton administration's anti-narcotics policy-maker said Saturday.

Only a small portion of the drugs that come into the United States
come through Cuba, Barry McCaffrey said, but the island's location and
a growing tourist market could make it an opportune target for drug
traffickers.

"I don't think it's a significant problem on balance yet, but as we
look to the future, my own assumption is that it will become one,"
McCaffrey told The Associated Press. "It's worth being worried about."

McCaffrey, a retired Army general, said the only direct contact the
United States has had with Cuba on drug policy has been between the Coast
Guard and Cuba's coastal enforcement authority.

"It appears consistent that when we give them intelligence, they act
on it," McCaffrey said.

He cautioned that Cuba lacks the resources to counter the world's
large drug-trafficking organizations. McCaffrey said drugs are
routinely flown over Cuba or dumped in Cuban waters without effective
resistance by the
President Fidel Castro's government.

But McCaffrey, whose last Army job made him the senior U.S. officer in
Latin America as chief of the Southern Command, said the Cuban
government has shown no sympathy for international drug traffickers and
consistently
confronts international drug traffickers when they threaten Cuba's
interests.

The United States has had no diplomatic relations with Cuba since
January 1961, a year after Castro took over in 1959 and began
nationalizing much of the country's industry. McCaffrey said Castro's
government remains a roadblock to further cooperation on drug trafficking.

"Our dilemma is that Cuba is still a one-party dictatorship with this
anachronistic Marxist economy that doesn't work," McCaffrey said. "And
so it's hard for us to get by our principles of support for democracy
when dealing with, in the coming years, a drug-policy issue."

McCaffrey also blasted President Ernesto Perez Balladares of Panama
for not supporting a continued U.S. military role in Panama to fight
drugs. McCaffrey said Balladares and his party, the Democratic
Revolutionary Party,
agreed to a U.S. force in private negotiations but campaigned against
it in elections.

"They ill-served their own future in the way they handled these
negotiations," McCaffrey said.