Cuba may soon lose a much-reviled status: terrorism sponsor

US President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro will be at the Summit of the Americas in Panama later this week. The State Department has completed its review of Cuba's inclusion on the US list of terrorism sponsors.

|
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
President Obama announced that the US State Department has completed its review of Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism during a trip to Jamaica on Thursday.

Cuba’s inclusion on the US list of countries that sponsor terrorism has remained a major sticking point in the push to restore diplomatic ties between the two nations. But on Thursday, President Obama signaled that could soon change.

Speaking after a meeting with Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller as he visited her country, the president announced that the State Department has completed its review of Cuba’s spot on the list. He is now awaiting a recommendation from his White House security team on whether to lift the designation. Two unnamed administration officials told CNN earlier this week that the State Department report gives the all clear.

The Associated Press reports that a decision could come as soon as Friday, when Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro will be in Panama at the Summit of the Americas. It will be one of the few times that the two countries’ leaders have shared a stage since Dwight Eisenhower and Fulgencio Batista met in 1958 – and the ideal opportunity to unveil what could be a major step toward renewed relations.

In addition to being a symbolic gesture of trust and good faith, Cuba’s removal from the list would also lead to significant diplomatic improvements that could make the overall normalization process much easier.

An unnamed Cuban diplomat told The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson that the terror listing had practical repercussions for Cuba’s diplomatic legation in Washington. Restricted access to credit and financial systems in the US is among the most burdensome.

“Just imagine the trouble it causes, at every level when you have a diplomatic legation which has a budget of tens of millions of dollars a years and it cannot have a bank account,” the diplomat told Mr. Anderson.

The designation has also been a major barrier to the reopening of embassies that have been closed for nearly five decades. Talks between Washington and Havana on this issue have stalled, in part because Cuba’s demand that it be removed from the list had not been resolved. As The New York Times reports:

Since 1977, Cuba and the United States have had “interests sections” in their respective capitals. They perform many of the functions of an embassy but do so under decidedly second-class status – and with enough suspicion and rancor that they have long been subject to restrictions, including limits on diplomats’ travel …

Beyond that, Cuban officials have complained that keeping their nation on the terror list is a political stunt out of sync with larger Middle East threats and the growing number of American travelers who regularly visit the island.

The State Department added Cuba to the list in 1982, when the country was still backing Marxist insurgencies against US-supported regimes around the world. Although the fall of the Soviet Union effectively brought an end to its international guerrilla campaign, Cuba has remained listed alongside Iran, Sudan, and Syria.

"Throughout this process, our emphasis has been on the facts," Mr. Obama said on Thursday, according to the AP. "We want to make sure that given this is a powerful tool to isolate those countries that genuinely do support terrorism, that when we make those designations, we've got strong evidence that's the case and as circumstance change, that list will change as well."

In making the recommendation as reported by CNN, the State Department has certified that Cuba has not provided support to terrorist groups within the past six months. The department itself said “there was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training to terrorist groups” in a report published last April.

But the report, the most recent available, did say that Cuba has “long provided safe haven” for Basque separatists, Colombian rebels, and an unspecified number of fugitives wanted in the US.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Cuba may soon lose a much-reviled status: terrorism sponsor
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2015/0409/Cuba-may-soon-lose-a-much-reviled-status-terrorism-sponsor
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe