THE United States, conceived in revolution itself, has seldom been too comfortable with other states taking similar action, especially when the chosen route diverted from their own.

Nor, since President Monroe, has it been comfortable with the notion that independent Latin American states followed independent foreign policies.

Castro's Cuba, which chose Communist revolution and backed the Soviet Union in world affairs, offends the United States on both counts and seems to have blinkered both the White House and the State Department even when nominally liberal Presidents, from Kennedy to Clinton, run the country. President Clinton's attempt to bully Cuba into conformity with what he thinks is good for it has reached a new stage when he now wants to bully all who trade with it.

It clearly must be election time. And so it is.

And there must be votes in the President's behaviour, which has upset so many of its trading partners, especially in Europe, who are threatened with various penalties for seeking to trade with a Communist state, admittedly a small one. Well, there are votes in it in Florida, a state which used to be unimportant politically until lots of older people migrated there in search of a sunny retirement.

They did so in such numbers that Florida became worth winning in the American electoral system which gives each state a varying electoral vote but delivers it en bloc to which ever party wins a majority. Older people tend to vote for right-wing candidates, and so Florida, which used to be solid for the Democrats, can easily vote Republican nowadays, a tendency reinforced by its large Cuban emigre minority.

President Clinton's motives deserve little more examination, but they expose unpleasant hypocrisies (do not all the same criteria as disqualify Cuba apply equally to China?) and suggest a degree of immaturity: the Americans took the huff when Castro came to power - and have never recovered.

The best way to promote democracy in Cuba is the way found for Russia by President Reagan, but then Reagan was never short of supporters anywhere between Miami and Tampa.