In this light, the Council's report, U.S.-Cuban Relations in the 21st Century, is welcome. It contains prudent analysis that one would expect. For example, it examines the question of how and under what terms the current ban on travel to Cuba might be lifted. To Castro, cut off for the past 10 years from Soviet subsidies, tourism has become a critical source of hard currency. He cannot but hope to attract ever larger numbers of American tourists.

On this issue, the report says: ``People-to-people contacts are desirable only if they help level the playing field between the Cuban people and the Cuban government. Allowing unrestricted travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens under existing conditions in Cuba would overwhelmingly benefit the Cuban government at the expense of the Cuban people.''

On labor rights, the Castro regime claims it has the interests of workers at heart. But, the report notes that ``[We] must have realistic expectations and measurements for progress toward the legal recognition of independent labor unions.'' After all, ``the world has a universal standard on labor rights,'' which ought ``to be enforced in Cuba and everywhere else in the world.''

With the Cold War over and new security threats -- terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction, narco-traffickers acting like independent states and others -- emerging, it is fitting to reappraise the U.S.-Cuban military relationship, characterized until now by hostility. The report makes a fundamental point: ``Joint measures between U.S. and Cuban agencies help legitimize the role of the Cuban military and, worse, the Castro regime's internal security apparatus.''

It would be difficult to disagree with such views. The problem is that they belong to the ``additional and dissenting views'' section of the report. In other words, the report endorses the type of initiatives that the sources cited above oppose, from American participation in Castro's ``apartheid tourism'' in hotels whose employees' hard-currency, i.e., dollar wages, are 95 percent confiscated by the government to official contacts with the military, which protects the dictator from an increasingly bitter population.

And these aren't insignificant sources. They include labor leader Jay Mazur and foreign-policy scholars Susan Kaufman Purcell and Ted Carpenter -- precisely the kind of individuals who give the Council its eminence as an institution. The report covers 33 pages, followed by more than half as many pages of dissent.

It was funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, Christopher Reynolds and General Services foundations, which over the years have spent more than $1 million annually promoting a lifting of the embargo, while ignoring human rights. The report's credibility is further undercut by its misstatement that Sen. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, supported an authorization bill softening the sanctions.

The mistake is serious because it remained in the report even after Sen. Helms's aide, Marc Thiessen, pointed it out. If the task force cannot pay attention to Helms, can it at least take note of real facts in Cuba? As the Heritage Foundation's Daniel Fisk -- one of the dissenters -- puts it with unbeatable simplicity, ``The problem on the island is the denial of freedom to the Cuban people.'' This is a simple problem that the task force solves simply -- by ignoring it.