Lampoon them as Havana Hillary and Fidel Schumer. That is, the two Democratic senators from New York who yesterday cast a vote in Washington for Communist Cuba. They voted to support an amendment to prevent the American government from spending any money to enforce the ban on travel by Americans to Cuba. There seem to be a fair number of farm-state legislators voting to ease up on the dictatorship down there. But what could possibly be the motive for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Schumer?

To figure out the right way to vote on this issue, Havana Hillary and Fidel Schumer could have consulted their colleagues, the four Democratic senators from New Jersey and Florida, two states with large communities of Cuban-Americans. Knowing the horrors of the Castro regime, these Cuban-Americans are aghast at the idea of American tourists injecting dollars into Castro’s failing economy. So Senators Graham and Nelson of Florida and Corzine and Lautenberg of New Jersey voted for a harder line against the Castro regime — unlike Havana Hillary and Fidel Schumer.

Or the senators from New York might have consulted with Senator Lieberman, the Democrat of Connecticut, a beacon of good sense on the Cuba issue ever since the 1988 campaign in which he unseated an incumbent Republican senator, Lowell Weicker, by accusing him of being soft on Cuba. Mr. Lieberman, too, voted yesterday for a hard line against the Castro regime (which is more than can be said for his opponents in the presidential race, Senators Edwards and Kerry, who skipped work yesterday and did not vote.)

Or Senators Clinton and Schumer might have checked with the White House, which, the Associated Press reported yesterday, said that American tourism in Cuba “provides economic resources to the Castro regime while doing nothing to help the Cuban people.”

Or Mrs. Clinton, in deciding how to vote, might have examined her own campaign press clippings. Meeting with the Daily News editorial board in October 2000, weeks before she was elected, Mrs. Clinton said, “I’m not in favor of lifting the embargo at this point in absence of Castro making some sign he’s going to move towards democratization, let political prisoners out of jail, stop imprisoning them.” Also in October of 2000, in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, as reported in the New York Times, Mrs. Clinton “said she would oppose lifting the embargo against Cuba until democracy took root there.”

Now, Havana Hillary may draw some sort of distinction between the travel ban and the embargo, but that seems to us — as it no doubt does to Senators Graham and Lieberman and the Cuban-American community — as an awfully fine distinction. If anything, as numerous human rights groups and the American State Department have documented, the Cuban tyrant’s treatment of political prisoners has worsened recently. It certainly hasn’t improved since 2000.

We’ve no doubt that Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Clinton would prefer a free Cuba to an enslaved one, and they may well sincerely believe that American tourism will be an influence for freedom on the island, as, say, proponents of American trade with Communist China insist that the presence of American businessmen in Beijing will help spread freedom there. We don’t deride this viewpoint, but we are skeptical. American tourists in Cuba are mainly treated to propaganda lectures from carefully selected Communist guides. They feed a prostitution problem on the island. Should the tourists venture any political activism, the Cubans they interact with are promptly detained by government authorities.

The Havana Hillary camp and its allies make the case that the existing travel ban and embargo haven’t succeeded in ousting Mr. Castro. But if ousting the dictator is the goal, there a whole range of harder-line policy options that could be considered. There could be more funding and support for opposition groups. There could be a boatlift that would illuminate for the world how desperate Cuba’s citizens are to flee to freedom. There could be an end to America’s “wet-foot-dry-foot” policy of returning to Cuba those who leave the island in rickety boats unless they miraculously make it all the way to American soil.

But Havana Hillary and Fidel Schumer haven’t been exactly vocal in advocating any of these approaches. Their plan for toppling Castro, so far as we can discern, pretty much amounts to unleashing camera-toting American tourists in Bermuda shorts. It’s something short of sending in the marines.

And in the policy debate over whether tourism or a harder line is a preferable approach, some deference is due to the Cuban-American exile community. They have families whose freedom is at stake. Compare that to those pushing the lifting of the travel ban — primarily farm-state senators, many of whom also opposed American sanctions on Iran and Libya. They see tourism as a wedge that they can use to break down the entire embargo of Cuba. Once they’ve done that, they’ll no doubt proceed to recommending that America trade with Iran and North Korea, so assuring the longevity of these brutal regimes and helping to fund their efforts to obtain nuclear weapons.

Even beyond Cuba policy, there is a rule of law issue here. When Congress voted earlier this year to prevent federal marshals from spending any money to remove the Ten Commandments from courthouses, the liberals screamed. The action to prevent money from being spent to enforce the travel ban is a similar dodge. If Congress wants to repeal the travel ban in a straightforward way, that is one thing. But to ban the executive branch from spending money to enforce laws is a practice that erodes the respect for rule of law overall. But then, the rule of law is something that Castro and his sympathizers have never had much respect for, anyway.