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''If you would have asked me six months ago, I would have said we should begin to ease the embargo in return for human-rights concessions,'' he said, responding to a question from a Herald reporter at a dinner Sunday night in Seattle. ``But you can't do it now because Castro has just locked up a huge number of human-rights activists and put them in prison and [held] show trials. You can't reward that kind of behavior if what you want to do is link human-rights behavior with foreign trade.''

''I can't say I know him, but I appreciate his sensitivity to the issue,'' said Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation and one of the harshest recent critics of Bush's Cuba policies. ``He's saying what any reasonable person would say.''

''Look, the road to the White House goes through South Florida, and anyone who's running for president is looking at the numbers,'' Garcia added.