WASHINGTON -- Cuba has shown willingness to help the United States fight the international drug trade but has been largely ineffective at it, the Clinton administration's antinarcotics policymaker said Saturday.

Only a small portion of the drugs that come into the United States come through Cuba, Barry McCaffrey said, but the island's location and a growing tourist market could make it an opportune target for drug traffickers.

``I don't think it's a significant problem on balance yet, but as we look to the future, my own assumption is that it will become one,'' McCaffrey said. ``It's worth being worried about.''

McCaffrey, a retired Army general, said the only direct contact the United States has had with Cuba on drug policy has been between the Coast Guard and Cuba's coastal enforcement authority.

``It appears consistent that when we give them intelligence, they act on it,'' McCaffrey said.

He cautioned that Cuba lacks the resources to counter the world's large drug-trafficking organizations. McCaffrey said drugs are routinely flown over Cuba or dumped in Cuban waters without effective resistance by President Fidel Castro's government.

But McCaffrey, whose last Army job made him the senior U.S. officer in Latin America as chief of the Southern Command, said the Cuban government has shown no sympathy for international drug traffickers and consistently confronts international drug traffickers when they threaten Cuba's interests.

The United States broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961, after Castro began nationalizing much of the country's industry, but the two countries maintain quasi-diplomatic missions in their respective capitals known as interests sections. McCaffrey said U.S. policy toward Castro remains a roadblock to further cooperation on drug trafficking.

``Our dilemma is that Cuba is still a one-party dictatorship with this anachronistic Marxist economy that doesn't work,'' McCaffrey said. ``And so it's hard for us to get by our principles of support for democracy when dealing with, in the coming years, a drug policy issue.''

McCaffrey blasted President Ernesto Perez Balladares of Panama for not supporting a continued U.S. military role in Panama to fight drugs. McCaffrey said Balladares and his party, the Democratic Revolutionary Party, agreed to a U.S. force in private negotiations but campaigned against it in elections.

``They ill-served their own future in the way they handled these negotiations,'' McCaffrey said.