Biden, Everyone Knows Cuba is Not a Terrorist Country

By Cheryl LaBash on November 22, 2022

Cuba’s Ambassador to the United Nations Yuri Gala López explains SSOT designation at the National Network on Cuba meeting in New York. photo: Bill Hackwell

The Biden administration certainly must have gotten the message after the 185 to 2 vote for the thirtieth consecutive year, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the US starvation blockade on Cuba. Country after country from almost all continents not only condemned the U.S. economic war while making special emphasis to remove Cuba from the spurious arbitrary State Department List alleging State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT).

Both capitalist parties may thumb their noses in imperial fashion at the world’s UN votes, but already two U.S. labor organizations are telling the Biden administration to pay attention to voices in the U.S. beyond the minority in South Florida and take Cuba off the SSOT.

At the end of October, the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific, Southern California Region, issued a resolution that “strongly urges President Biden and Congress, … to remove Cuba from the United States list of state sponsors of terrorism.” Now, just weeks later, the Troy NY Labor Council’s Nov. 16 resolution also called for the Biden administration to remove Cuba from the arbitrary and unilateral SSOT.

A draft resolution calling on the Biden administration to use its executive authority to remove Cuba from the State Department’s sanction enhancing list is being circulated among city councils, state legislatures, labor organizations, county commissions, school boards and others. Already resolutions from elected bodies opposing U.S. Cuba policy that represent more than 40 million U.S. constituents.

Facts should matter. The Obama administration removed Cuba from the arguably invalid State Department list. Nothing had changed when on January 12, 2021 outgoing executive Trump used his authority to besmirch Cuba by declaring it a SSOT. And who is the US anyway to create such a unilateral list considering the havoc it wreaks on the planet. Cuba which was an example of solidarity throughout the covid-19 pandemic, saving lives at home by developing its own vaccines and across the world with the Henry Reeve Brigade. Already 243 surgically honed additional sanctions had targeted Cuba’s economy in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic years, intentionally harming the Cuban people.

As Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parilla said on Nov. 3 at the United Nations General Assembly debate on Cuba’s resolution to end the U.S. blockade:

“The financial persecution has been further reinforced with the arbitrary and fraudulent inclusion of our country in the State Department’s unilateral list of alleged countries sponsoring terrorism, which exponentially raises the so-called Country Risk and forces us to pay for any merchandise even at double its price in the international market.

“Such action is inadmissible against a nation victim of terrorism, which even today suffers the instigation of violence and terrorist acts from U.S. territory; and whose conduct of firm rejection and persecution of any form or manifestation of terrorism, is unimpeachable and recognized.

“It was a lethal measure imposed by the previous Republican administration, only 9 days [before] leaving the White House. The current President could correct it with just a signature. It would be the morally correct and lawful thing to do.”

This is why the member groups of the National Network on Cuba are focusing their work in the upcoming year at removing Cuba from the SSOT list, a step toward ending the unjust, cruel one-sided economic war on Cuba. What more can YOU do?

Source: Struggle – La Lucha