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With less than a week left in office, United States President Joe Biden is expected to remove Cuba's designation as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” according to anonymous sources familiar with his plans.
The Associated Press news agency broke the story on Tuesday, citing US officials. But the move is likely to be more of a symbolic measure than a lasting policy.
With President-elect Donald Trump set to take office on January 20, the decision could quickly be overturned by the next administration. Still, the Biden administration went ahead, notifying Congress of its intent.
“The assessment has been completed and we have no information to support the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism,” a White House official told AFP.
Cuban officials, meanwhile, called the announcement long overdue. On social media, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called Biden's actions “positive” but “limited” in their efficacy.
“Cuba should never have been included on an arbitrary list of state sponsors of terrorism,” he said wrote. “This was an arbitrary and politically motivated determination with a very serious impact on the Cuban population, damaging the economy, causing shortages and encouraging migration to the US.”
However, this is not the first time that the anti-Cuba designation has been revoked and reimposed. And Republicans quickly announced their intention to fight the change.
“Today's decision is fundamentally unacceptable,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a Cuban-American lawmaker, said in a statement to the media.
“The terrorism developed by the Cuban regime has not stopped. I will work with President Trump and my colleagues to immediately reverse and limit the damage from the decision.
Cold War Politics
Cuba was first designated a “state sponsor of terrorism” in 1982, during the presidency of conservative leader Ronald Reagan.
The US State Department explains on its website that Cuba was sanctioned because of its “long history of providing advice, sanctuary, communications, training and financial support to guerrilla groups and individual terrorists”.
The designation was made during the last decade of the Cold War. Diplomatic relations between the two countries had long been severed until this point, largely because of Cuba's close ties to the former Soviet Union, a Cold War adversary of the US.
By this time, Cuba had also weathered the decades-long US trade embargo.
However, the designation as a “state sponsor of terrorism” further isolates the Caribbean country, limiting its ability to engage in financial transactions with US-based institutions and prohibiting it from receiving US aid.
Ahead of Tuesday's announcement, there are only three countries besides Cuba identified as “state sponsors of terrorism” in the US. These include North Korea, Iran and Syria.
Back and forth
But Biden's decision echoes that of his close Democratic ally, the former president Barack Obama.
Biden served as vice president during Obama's two terms, including in 2015, when his administration pursued “defrosting” in US relations with Cuba.
In April of that year, Obama announced that he would remove Cuba from the list of “state sponsors of terrorism” after meetings with the then president of Cuba Raul Castro.
At the time, Obama assured 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 went a step further and declared that the US would re-establishes official diplomatic relations with Cuba for the first time since the 1960s.
“Instead of supporting democracy and opportunity for the Cuban people, our well-intentioned efforts to isolate Cuba have increasingly had the opposite effect: cementing the status quo and isolating the United States from our neighbors in this hemisphere,” Obama said at the time. “We must not be prisoners of the past.”
He noted that Cuba is less than 150 kilometers (90 miles) from Florida's coastline.
But when Trump succeeded Obama as president in 2017, he took a tougher approach to foreign policy, including sanctions for Cuban products.
On January 12, 2021 in the city waning days since his first term Trump put Cuba back on the list of “state sponsors of terrorism”.
“With this action, we will once again hold the government of Cuba accountable and send a clear message: The Castro regime must end its support for international terrorism and the subversion of American justice,” Trump's secretary of state at the time, Mike Pompeo, said. in a message statement.
He accused Cuba of having “fed, sheltered and provided medical care to murderers, bomb-makers and hijackers” for decades.
Meanwhile, the Cuban government blown up change as “hypocrisy” and “political opportunism.”
Political bloc
After Trump was re-elected for a second term in November, there was speculation that Biden himself might make a similar move, using the final days of his presidency to reverse Trump's decision.
On November 15, for example, a group of Democratic representatives, led by outgoing Rep. Barbara Lee, sent a letter to the Biden White House calling for “immediate action” to address the worsening humanitarian situation in Cuba.
The letter quotes the fee of Hurricane Raphael on the island, as well as the country's crumbling energy infrastructure, which has led to frequent eclipses. From 2021 in Cuba there is also a record number citizens are leaving its borders in response to economic instability.
“The situation is not only causing immense suffering to the Cuban people, but also poses a serious risk to US national security interests,” the letter said. “If left unchecked, the crisis will almost certainly fuel increased migration, strain US border management systems, and completely destabilize the already strained Caribbean region.”
By removing Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” the letter's authors indicated that more oil resources could reach the island, thereby “facilitating access to energy and economic relief for the Cuban people.”
But Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida denounced such a proposal as an “unacceptable risk.”
His state has a large population of Cuban refugees who fled repression and economic instability in Cuba in the latter half of the 20th century — and who form a powerful Republican voting bloc.
“The calls at the 11th hour of the Biden administration by Communist sympathizers in the Democratic Party for President Biden to remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list are not just ignorant, but dangerous,” Scott said in a statement to the Florida Phoenix Post. .
Trump's nominee for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio, is a descendant of Cuban immigrants and has also criticized efforts to lift government restrictions on the island.
He previously called Obama's efforts to normalize relations “unilateral discounts“.
