WASHINGTON — When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was considering the confirmation of Alexander F. Watson as the State Department's key official on Latin America last year, all of the questions posed by lawmakers concerned just three countries--Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua--near flyspecks when laid against the expanse of the Western Hemisphere.

Watson, assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, later recalled that he joked to South American journalists that the senators had agreed not to ask about any country with a population of more than 15 million.

With the end of the Cold War, which had skewed U.S. relations with Latin America for most of the last half-century, the United States is trying to refocus its approach to its closest neighbors on trade, investment and the promotion of democracy. Administration officials say conditions in the Hemisphere--especially in the larger countries, such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico--are more favorable than they have been for decades for cooperative U.S.-Latin relations on those subjects.

It may yet work out that way, of course, but crises such as the outpouring of Cuban raft refugees and the occupation of Haiti keep getting in the way.

"The great tragedy about Cuba and Haiti is that it was almost predictable that these issues would come up and dominate the agenda and force out broader subjects," said Kenneth R. Maxwell, director of the Latin America project of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

"There is no long-term strategic thinking at all," Maxwell said. "Americans who don't focus much on Latin America tend to see Latin America as Nicaragua writ large or Cuba writ large or Haiti writ large. If you go to a huge vibrant city like Sao Paulo (Brazil), that's where Latin America is dealing with problems."

Administration officials concede that with about 15,000 U.S. troops deployed in Haiti, it is not surprising that public attention is drawn to that unstable, violent and impoverished Caribbean nation.

"This has always been sort of a neglected area of U.S. foreign policy," one State Department official admitted. "We only seem to deal with Latin America when there are problems or unsavory dictators."

But he said the Clinton Administration, driven in part by the hemispherical summit scheduled for December in Miami, "is taking a closer look at Latin America on matters of trade and on our own agenda, like democracy and control of corruption."