Biden Administration Expected To Lift ‘Terror’ Designation for Cuba
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 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.
Biden served as vice president during Obama’s two terms in office, including in 2015, when his administration pursued a “thaw” 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 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 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 on Cuban products.
On January 12, 2021, in the waning days of his first term, Trump restored Cuba to the list 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 the change as “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 on the island, as well as the country’s crumbling energy infrastructure, which has led to frequent blackouts. Since 2021, Cuba has also seen a record number 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“.
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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