State Department officials have drawn up a proposal to designate Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, a last-hour foreign policy that would complicate the incoming Biden government’s plans to ease increased U.S. pressure on Havana.
With three more weeks until the inauguration day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo must decide, according to U.S. officials, to sign off on the plan, a move that also serves as thanks to Cuban Americans and other anti-communist Latinos in Florida. which strongly supported President Trump and his fellow Republicans in the November election.
It is unclear whether Mr. Pompeo decided to continue with the designation. But Democrats and foreign policy experts believe that Mr. Trump and his senior officials are eager to find ways to elect President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to limit his initial months in office and make it more difficult for Mr. Pray to turn Trump around. -era policies abroad. Trump officials have also tried in recent weeks to increase US pressure and sanctions on China and Iran.
A finding that a country has ‘repeatedly supported international acts of terrorism’, in the official description of the State Department of a state sponsor of terrorism, automatically leads to US sanctions against its government. If Cuba were added to the list, it would join just three other countries: Iran, North Korea and Syria.
Biden’s government can move quickly to take Cuba back from the list. But to do that would require more than a presidential pin. The Department of Foreign Affairs will have to conduct a formal investigation, a process that could take several months.
A State Department spokesman said the agency was not discussing ‘deliberations or possible deliberations’ regarding the designation of terrorism. The White House did not comment.
Democrats on Tuesday overruled Cuba’s proposal and criticized what they call an 11-hour foreign policy change that unfairly restricts the incoming Biden team.
“This is another stunt by this president with less than 23 days to go,” said Representative Gregory W. Meeks, a New York Democrat who is the new chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a statement. telephone interview said.
“He is trying to handcuff the incoming government,” he said. Meeks added.
The Foreign Ministry removed Cuba from its list of terrorist sponsors in 2015, after President Barack Obama normalized relations between Washington and Havana for the first time since the country’s communist revolution in 1959, which he called a remnant of called the Cold War, announced. In exchange for promises of political and social reform, Mr. Obama waives economic sanctions, eases travel and trade restrictions and reopens an Havana embassy for the first time in decades. In 2016, he becomes the first U.S. president to visit the island since Calvin Coolidge.
The Reagan administration first added Cuba to the terrorist list in 1982 in support of left-wing insurgents in Latin America. During the Obama era, the State Department called it a “safe haven” for Basque separatists and Colombian rebels. But Obama administration officials eventually concluded that the aging Basque had no terrorist threat, nor from Colombian rebels joining the Havana peace talks, which led to a 2016 peace deal with the government of Colombia.
The presidential transition
They were also prepared to accept that the Cuban government had housed a number of refugees in the United States, including Joanne D. Chesimard, 73, a former member of the Black Liberation Army. Me. Chesimard, now known as Assata Shakur, remains on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists for the 1973 assassination of a New Jersey troop.
In a possible preview of a re-listing, the State Department informed Congress in May that Cuba is one of the five countries it says “does not fully cooperate” in US counter-terrorism efforts – the first time since 2015 that Cuba has not has not been certified for this purpose. .
The notice denies Cuba a request from Colombia, an American ally, to extradite ten leaders of the country’s national liberation movement living in Havana after the group claimed responsibility for a bomb attack on a Bogotá police academy in January 2019 in which 22 people died.
But Democrats have said the idea that Cuba poses a terrorist threat to the outside world is political fiction.
‘This is total nonsense. “Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism,” said Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama played a key role in mediating the government’s agreement with Havana.
Mr. Trump denounced the deal as “terrible and misleading” and reversed many of its provisions. During visits to southern Florida, he boasted that he would defy communism in Latin America and warned that Mr. Biden would not do it, a message that proved popular with Cuban Americans and other voters who were hostile to Havana.
As a candidate, Mr. Biden promised to change US policy again, saying he would immediately reverse the failed Trump policy that harmed the Cuban people and would do nothing to promote democracy and human rights.
The repressive government of Cuba has largely disappointed the hope that it would liberalize after the death of its revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, in November 2016. Havana continues to arrest and detain dissidents and counter a recent hunger strike by artists and other activists in the capital. proving to many Republicans that his government does not deserve cordial relations from Washington.
Officials from the Trump administration have also been critical of the Cuban government’s support for Venezuela’s socialist leader Nicolás Maduro. Trump has tried for years in vain to get out of power.
In an opinion piece published in The Miami Herald this month, Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida and an influential voice on Cuba’s policy, called on Mr. Prayed to stand “there with the dissenters” and urged him not to “return to a one-sided side” of Cuba’s policies – and throw a lifeline to Raúl Castro’s dictatorial regime. ”
U.S. officials said the plan to restore Cuba to the list of terrorist sponsors was developed in a breach of the standard process by the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, and not the Bureau of Terrorism, which usually plays a central role in such would make a decision.
Mr. Rhodes cites the evidence of a politically motivated process. “It’s a sign that they know they can’t get Cuba on the merit on the list,” he said.
Critics say the Trump administration has begun politicizing such appointments, which are meant to be a matter of national security. This month, the United States removed Sudan from its list of terrorist sponsors before the African nation joined the list of Arab countries that have entered into diplomatic relations with Israel, a top priority for Mr. Trump.
The Trump administration recently shut down Cuban companies run by the Cuban military. Last week, the Department of Treasury blacklisted three such businesses.
A recent report commissioned by the State Department found that U.S. embassy staff in Havana became ill in 2016 due to a microwave weapon of unknown origin. The Cuban government has denied any knowledge of such attacks.
Pranshu Verma contribution made.