By José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez on February 27, 2023
On February 26, 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan instructed his Secretary of State to include Cuba on the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, in accordance with the provisions of legislation passed three years earlier, known as the Export Administration Act (Section 6).
This and other legislative texts that came to light at that time were the result of introspective analysis in the US Congress following the crushing defeat in Vietnam, the involvement of US federal agencies in a series of coups in Latin America, and the assassination of several foreign political leaders, among other evils.
The report of the Church Commission, for example, acknowledged for the first time the assassination attempts organized against Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro (8 of more than 600).
While this kind of exorcism was taking place in one sector of the US political class, at the other end of the spectrum, the so-called New Right was forming among those who believed that their country should not apologize for the crimes committed, that the confrontation with the socialist camp and progressive forces would have to be even more decisive, and that it was urgent to break down the barriers preventing US capital from penetrating every corner of the planet.
In terms of Latin America and the Caribbean, a four-star general turned diplomat, Alexander Haig, proposed the alternative of “going to the source,” according to which the social struggles in the region were not due to over exploitation by US transnational corporations and other abuses, but to the example set by Cuba’s struggle to preserve its sovereignty.
Government documents at the time offered no concrete justification for considering the island a terrorist country. That void was filled over the years with assumptions, journalistic speculation, and fragments of speeches by Reagan and his associates, who referred obsessively to the “Cuban influence.”
However, one of the keys to understanding what happened then and how Cuba appeared almost magically on that list was provided years later by a former member of the 2506 Brigade that invaded Playa Girón, a former US Navy officer, and a former senior executive of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF). In a book that can be considered part of his memoirs, Cuban-born lawyer Antonio (Tony) Zamora explained what happened in the volume Lo que aprendí sobre Cuba visitando a Cuba (What I Learned About Cuba Visiting Cuba, 2013).
Zamora had been an exceptional witness to the exchanges that took place between high-ranking officials of the Republican government at the time and his boss at the head of the FNCA, Jorge Mas Canosa. As part of those exchanges, Mas Canosa was asked to gather former CIA operatives, former mercenaries, former presidential aides, and other individuals for an electoral project to guarantee the highest number of votes in South Florida for Republican candidates.
As absolutely all political arrangements in the United States are transactional in nature, when Mas Canosa was notified of his new job, he was asked what he wanted in return. His reaction was immediate and brief: “include Cuba on the list of terrorist countries,” knowing in advance the stigma that this meant for the country in question and the door that would be opened to aspire to benefit constantly from federal funds that would be approved to try to change the state of affairs on the island.
The FNCA stamped its seal on legislation to launch the so-called Radio and TV Martí projects, the Torricelli Act, the Helms-Burton Act, and all the programs approved by the National Endowment for Democracy against Cuban influence.
At the time, Republican operatives did not consider Mas’ request to be a big deal, as Cuba was already under the effects of the economic, political, and financial blockade imposed in 1962. But over time, the sanctions imposed on those who appeared on the aforementioned list were refined and expanded.
In theory, it was terrorism that Cuba practiced on the small island of Grenada in 1983, where Cuban experts supported the construction of a civilian airport, which according to the US corporate press would serve as a springboard for the advance of communism in the region. Elite US military forces invaded the small country and murdered the local population and 24 Cuban aid workers.
Cuba’s inexplicable presence on that list served as a pretext for each of the attempts to exterminate the island that were carried out over the years, even after the disappearance of the socialist camp and long after an irregular war financed by the US federal budget had wiped out one by one all the alternative social and armed movements in Central America.
Cuba’s support for Angola’s sovereignty, Namibia’s independence, and the end of apartheid in South Africa was also considered a terrorist practice by the White House, at least until Nelson Mandela (also labeled a terrorist in his time) became a global symbol and was welcomed in the United States with full honors.
The issue of Cuba’s inclusion on the list, contrary to all reality, was a contentious issue in bilateral relations until the very moment when the reestablishment of bilateral diplomatic relations was agreed upon in July 2015.
On April 14, President Barack Obama sent a notification to Congress fulfilling the formality of declaring that Cuba had not participated in any terrorist actions in the previous six months and affirming that the Cuban government had given assurances that it would not participate in such activities in the future. The latter was obviously not taken from any Cuban document prepared for the occasion, but rather from Cuba’s permanent commitment to combating this scourge and its central role in the peace process in Colombia, which at that time was in its decisive stages.
For the purposes of analyzing this issue today, suffice it to recall that Obama took this step before a Republican-dominated Congress, which included several legislators of Cuban origin who threatened at every turn to block or limit the executive provisions regarding Cuba. For some reason, their cries fell on deaf ears, and their blackmail was ineffective.
On May 29 of that year, Secretary of State John Kerry went through the formality of removing Cuba’s name from the list, and on July 22, two days after the reopening of the Cuban embassy in Washington, the Federal Register explained that this decision amended the export administration regulations to implement the rescission of Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, particularly with regard to the removal of anti-terrorism licensing requirements and references to the country in that capacity, although it clarified that pre-existing licensing requirements for all products covered by the law would remain in place, unless an exception was authorized.
Five subsequent packages of measures contained general or specific licenses from the Obama administration for Cuba, which allowed for the implementation of limited commercial initiatives between the two countries, even with the blockade in place.
It was the first time that a country had been removed from the list without disappearing as such (South Yemen) or without being invaded and crushed, as in the cases of Iraq and Libya.
The Donald Trump administration did not push the issue from the outset in its efforts to roll back all the progress made in relations with Cuba. It preferred the campaign of alleged sonic attacks to justify the decline in bilateral exchanges and the drastic reduction of diplomatic personnel in both capitals. It then moved on to the presence of 20,000 invisible Cuban soldiers in Venezuela, when the coup against Caracas became a priority on the agenda of his new national security team, which took office at the end of 2018.
It was not until 2019 that the Colombian government of Iván Duque, now a professor at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., began to reiterate statements contrary to the spirit of the peace agreements in his country, pointing to Cuba, not for its role as guarantor, but for harboring and not handing over representatives of the National Liberation Army (ELN), a still belligerent force that was in the process of joining the peace talks at the time.
This induced Colombian belligerence coincided with the legal proceedings against the US president to achieve his impeachment at the behest of Congress, actions that forced him to establish alliances with any politician who could help avert catastrophe. It was then that, in another transactional exercise, Cuban-born Senator Marco Rubio exchanged his support from the Senate Intelligence Committee for more decisive actions against Cuba, ranging from a radical cut in air and sea travel between the two countries, the suspension of all official bilateral contacts, and the “nuclear option” under the Helms-Burton Act: eliminating the waiver for the non-application of Title III.
But it was not until after Trump’s defeat in his bid for re-election was confirmed that the list of countries sponsoring terrorism was used to make any move toward rapprochement with Cuba more difficult for the new Democratic administration that had already been elected.
A few days before leaving office (January 11, 2021), then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo locked himself in his office and, without listening to any opinions from other cabinet members or subordinates, signed a document returning Cuba’s name to the spurious list. Although the decision was completely unfounded (as in 1982), the US embassy in Havana rushed to gather arguments to justify this crime with escalation, nocturnality, and malice aforethought. But it mistakenly began by saying that “the Trump administration has been committed from the outset to denying the Castro regime the resources it needs,” revealing the real purposes behind the decision.
If this step was absurd, in violation of all the rules of sacrosanct interagency consultations, even more so was the official sanctification of such an act, when the newly inaugurated Joe Biden administration stated that “Cuba was not cooperating adequately in the United States’ efforts against terrorists,” despite the fact that 80 Democratic congressmen had expressed their opposition in a letter addressed to the president in March 2021. The reaffirmation of this nonsense came on May 11, 2022, in a hasty note from Anthony Blinken.
The reality is that until that date, Biden’s team had gladly accepted Trump’s assumption that a combination of an induced economic crisis and the effects of the pandemic would bring about the inevitable downfall of the Cuban government. But that did not happen, and Biden and his acolytes began to suffer one snub after another for that reason.
The first and most publicized was the failure of the so-called Summit of the Americas organized in Los Angeles in June 2022. The intention to isolate Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua backfired on the organizers.
This was followed by a high-profile denial when the new authorities in Bogotá, within hours of taking office (August 12, 2022), confirmed Cuba’s fundamental role in the peace negotiations and called directly on Washington to abandon its condemnatory practices toward the island.
And among many other statements along the same lines came the midterm elections, in which the Democrats not only lost across the board in Florida, but were also massacred for the first time in the three counties with the largest Cuban-American voter turnout, which until then had been a safe Democratic stronghold. There was no longer any need to look for a needle in a haystack.
In the rebirth of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States at its last summit (January 24, 2023), the entire region reaffirmed its opposition to the blockade and specifically to keeping Cuba on the “list.”
As if external calls on the White House to correct its mistake were not enough, within the United States, city councils in several cities have passed resolutions calling for cooperation with Cuba in general, in the area of health, the lifting of the blockade, and specifically the removal of Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism. The latest of these proposals is currently being debated in the capital, Washington, D.C.
At this point, even the US media understands that the mechanism for compiling the list itself and its opportunistic manipulation are proof of the falseness of the United States’ “commitment” to fighting terrorism as an international scourge.
In recent weeks, US authorities have been more open to official dialogue with Cuba, and delegations have met in both capitals to discuss issues related primarily to law enforcement and compliance, something unthinkable with a country that the US government considers to be a state sponsor of terrorism.
In short, all the conditions are in place for the current administration to correct the mistake made by others in the past, which was rectified once before. It is understandable that even with the blockade in place, a change on this issue would create new opportunities for bilateral exchange. Only the key element is missing: the political will of the president and his team. In Cuba, we call it something else.
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez is Director of the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba.
Source: Cubadebate, translated by Resumen Latinoamericano – English