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BIDEN ADMINISTRATION EXPECTED TO LIFT ‘TERROR’ DESIGNATION FOR
CUBA
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January 14, 2025
Al Jazeera
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_ “It means that humanitarian organisations, church groups and
various human rights organisations can now move aid to help the people
in Cuba without facing any sort of US sanctions,” Fisher said. _
Airport workers receive JetBlue flight 387, the first commercial
flight between the US and Cuba in more than a half century, on August
31, 2016, in Santa Clara, Cuba , Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo
A Cold War policy
Speaking from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera correspondent Alan Fisher
explained that Tuesday’s decision would clear the way for Cuba to
receive humanitarian aid from US institutions.
“It means that humanitarian organisations, church groups and various
human rights organisations can now move aid to help the people in Cuba
without facing any sort of US sanctions,” Fisher said.
In conjunction with the designation’s removal, Cuba announced it
would release 553 prisoners accused of “various crimes”, including
some likely swept up in anti-government protests
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in 2021.
Cuba was first designated a “state sponsor of terrorism” in 1982,
under the presidency of conservative leader Ronald Reagan.
The US Department of State explains on its website that Cuba was
sanctioned for “its long history of providing advice, safe haven,
communications, training, and financial support to guerrilla groups
and individual terrorists”.
The designation was made during the final decade of the Cold War.
Diplomatic relations between the two countries had long been severed
by that point, in large part due to Cuba’s close ties with the
former Soviet Union, the US’s Cold War adversary.
Cuba had also weathered a decades-long US trade embargo by that point.
Being labelled a “state sponsor of terrorism”, however, further
isolated the Caribbean country, limiting its ability to participate in
financial transactions with US-based institutions and barring it from
receiving US assistance.
In the lead-up to Tuesday’s announcement, there were only three
countries besides Cuba identified as “state sponsors of terrorism”
in the US. They include North Korea, Iran and Syria.
Back-and-forth
Biden’s decision, however, echoes that of his close Democratic ally,
former President Barack Obama
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Biden served as vice president during Obama’s two terms in office,
including in 2015, when his administration pursued a “thaw
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in the US relationship with Cuba.
In April of that year, Obama announced he would remove Cuba from the
list of “state sponsors of terrorism”, following meetings
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with then-Cuban President Raul Castro.
At the time, Obama reassured Congress that Cuba had “provided
assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in
the future”.
A few months later, in July 2015, Obama took a step further and
declared that the US would re-establish formal diplomatic relations
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with Cuba for the first time since the 1960s.
“Instead of supporting democracy and opportunity for the Cuban
people, our efforts to isolate Cuba despite good intentions
increasingly had the opposite effect: cementing the status quo and
isolating the United States from our neighbours in this hemisphere,”
Obama said at the time. “We don’t have to be imprisoned by the
past.”
He noted that Cuba lies less than 150 kilometres (90 miles) from the
Florida coastline.
But when Trump succeeded Obama as president in 2017, he took a more
hardline approach to foreign policy, including sanctions
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on Cuban products.
On January 12, 2021, in the waning days
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of his first term, Trump restored Cuba to the list
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of “state sponsors of terrorism”.
“With this action, we will once again hold Cuba’s government
accountable and send a clear message: the Castro regime must end its
support for international terrorism and subversion of US justice,”
Trump’s secretary of state at the time, Mike Pompeo, said in a
statement.
He accused Cuba of having “fed, housed, and provided medical care
for murderers, bombmakers and hijackers” for decades.
The Cuban government, meanwhile, blasted
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“hypocrisy” and “political opportunism”.
A political bloc
After Trump was re-elected to a second term in November, there had
been speculation that Biden himself could pull a similar move, using
the final days of his presidency to reverse Trump’s decision.
On November 15, for instance, a group of Democratic representatives,
led by outgoing lawmaker Barbara Lee, sent the Biden White House a
letter urging “immediate action” to address the deteriorating
humanitarian situation in Cuba.
The letter cited the toll of Hurricane Rafael
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on the island, as well as the country’s crumbling energy
infrastructure, which has led to frequent blackouts
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Since 2021, Cuba has also seen a record number
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of citizens leave its borders, in response to the economic
instability.
“The situation is not only causing immense suffering for the Cuban
people but also poses serious risks to U.S. national security
interests,” the letter said. “If left unaddressed, the crisis will
almost certainly fuel increased migration, strain U.S. border
management systems, and fully destabilize the already-strained
Caribbean region.”
By removing Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”, the
letter-writers indicated that more oil resources could reach the
island, thereby “facilitating access to energy and economic relief
for the Cuban people”.
But Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida denounced such a
proposition as an “unacceptable risk”.
His state has a large population of Cuban refugees who fled repression
and economic instability in Cuba during the latter half of the 20th
century — and who form a powerful Republican-leaning voting bloc.
“Calls at the 11th hour of the Biden administration from
communist-sympathizers in the Democrat Party for President Biden to
remove Cuba from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list are not just
ignorant, but dangerous,” Scott said in a statement to the Florida
Phoenix publication.
Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Senator Marco Rubio, is the
descendant of Cuban immigrants and has likewise blasted efforts to
roll back restrictions on the island’s government.
He has previously called Obama’s efforts to normalise relations
“one-sided concessions
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Fisher, the Al Jazeera correspondent, noted that Biden had been
critical of Trump’s decision to place Cuba back on the “terror”
list so late in his first term as president.
Tuesday’s decision therefore marks a significant role reversal for
the two leaders. Trump now faces the question of whether to undo
Biden’s actions.
“Could this be easily flipped? Well, it’s not completely easy to
do, but certainly Donald Trump could make a number of executive orders
in the first couple of days [of his second administration] that would
effectively nullify what Joe Biden has done,” Fisher explained.
“But it’s interesting that the Biden campaign and the Biden team
criticised Donald Trump doing this on his way out the door. And here,
Joe Biden has done exactly the same, with just six days left in the
White House.”
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Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies
* US Cuba Relations; Biden; Cuba;
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