Bush assails Cuba over sex trade

TAMPA -- President Bush yesterday stepped up his effort to raise the importance of cultural issues in the campaign, tailoring a speech here on sex trafficking to appeal to Florida's Cuban exiles and to religious conservatives.

Bush's speech was officially a nonpolitical appearance at a Justice Department conference on trafficking in forced labor. But he cast his message in religious and moral terms and added an extended criticism of Fidel Castro, appealing to two key constituencies in this fiercely contested state.

''The regime in Havana, already one of the worst violators of human rights in the world, is adding to its crimes: The dictator welcomes sex tourism," Bush said. ''We have put a strategy in place to hasten the day when no Cuban child is exploited to finance a failed revolution and every Cuban citizen will live in freedom."

Cuba was not mentioned in the State Department's annual report on human trafficking in 2001 and 2002, which a spokesman said was an indication that the United States could not determine that there were at least 100 victims in that country. But in the past two years, Cuba has been categorized as one of the leading offenders, this year ranking in the top 10 alongside countries such as North Korea, Burma, Sudan, and Venezuela.

If the appeal to Cuban-Americans was overlooked, Bush underscored the message by stopping his motorcade at a Cuban cafe, La Tropicana, where he got ham, pork, and cheese sandwiches.

Bush has been working to elevate social issues in the presidential race, focusing attention on a more hospitable subject than the economy and the Iraq war, two favorite themes of Democratic opponent John F. Kerry. Bush's Saturday radio address, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush's radio address tomorrow will feature ''a changing-the-culture message that really focuses on strengthening families." The Bush campaign launched television ads emphasizing the abortion issue Thursday, a day after Bush's push for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage failed in the Senate.

After the Florida visit, Bush flew to Beckley, W.Va., to speak at a campaign rally. The West Virginia trip, for which Bush added to his regular stump speech an accusation that Kerry would decimate the state's coal industry, came a week after Kerry held a rally nearby and 12 days after Bush's previous visit to the state, considered evenly split.

Bush's brief speech in Tampa was given a moral cast by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who compared Bush to Abraham Lincoln and introduced him as ''a leader who has called us to an understanding of freedom, not as America's gift to the world, but as the Almighty's gift to humanity."

The president, joined on the stage by his brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, described trafficking in people as ''one of the worst offenses against human dignity."

Bush referred to an 11-year-old remark by Castro acknowledging that prostitution had returned to Cuba since the communist revolution closed the brothels but saying that the country has ''the cleanest and most educated prostitutes." Bush said Castro had ''bragged" about the sex business.

Castro said of the allegation last month: ''It is cynical to include Cuba in a list of states practicing trafficking of human beings, but it is still more infamous to claim that Cuba promotes child sex tourism."

Kerry's campaign yesterday noted that the Senate still has not ratified a UN protocol on the subject signed by President Clinton in 2000. ''If the president were really serious about this issue, this protocol would have sailed through the Senate years ago," Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said.