How Biden Embraced Trump’s Terror Smear Against Cuba

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On this day four years ago, a week after the MAGA brigades stormed the Capitol, Donald Trump’s outgoing administration put Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list.

The move irked former and current US officials — there is a broad consensus in the intelligence community that Cuba does not sponsor terrorism. But Joe Biden, who was part of the Obama administration’s legacy-making rapprochement with the island, was expected to promptly reverse it.

Four years later, Cuba is still on the list.

“Nobody worth their salt in the world of counterterrorism sees Cuba as a country that would do the United States harm,” said Jason Blazakis, director of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office from 2008 to 2018. “The US is willing to negotiate with the Taliban. Yet here we are with a country ninety miles away, not committing any acts of terrorism, and taking a hard line.”

Perhaps no single aspect of Joe Biden’s Latin America policy has been as controversial, confounding, and defining as his refusal to remove Cuba from the terror blacklist, which has battered Cuba’s economy by cutting it off from trade, credit, and investment.

“No matter what you think of the Cuban government or the Cuban system . . . it does not belong on that list,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), ranking member of the House Rules Committee. “We’re trying to economically strangle Cuba. . . . Average Cubans are the ones who are paying the price.”

Cuba was first put on the SSOT list in 1982 by the Reagan administration, which accused it of funding and arming left-wing revolutionary groups in Latin America but neglected to provide evidence linking Cuba to specific acts of terrorism.

Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan was propping up the Contras, the region’s most notorious insurgency. Human Rights Watch charged the right-wing paramilitary organization with systematic violations of “the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict,” including indiscriminate attacks on civilians and the selective murder of noncombatants.

Cuba’s state sponsor of terrorism designation outlasted nearly all of Latin America’s leftist insurgencies by two decades, until Barack Obama removed Cuba from the SSOT list in May 2015 as a part of his historic détente with the nation.

For more than five years, Cuba remained off the list, even as the Trump administration rolled back the rest of Obama’s Cuba policy, shuttering the embassy and levying an array of “maximum pressure” sanctions on the island.

The terrorism designation adds insult to injury for many Cubans, who for decades were victims of US-backed terrorism. Then, with eight days left in Trump’s first term, after both his reelection campaign and the January 6 insurrection had failed, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo returned Cuba to the list.

The Trump administration’s justifications for the terror designation were even more of a stretch than Reagan’s: the Cuban government’s support of Venezuela; its harboring of black political fugitives such as Assata Shakur; and its role as a mediator, along with Norway, in brokering peace talks between the Colombian government and that country’s National Liberation Army (ELN), considered a terrorist organization by the US government.

The first two justifications had nothing to do with terrorism. The last referred to Cuba’s refusal to extradite ten ELN members to Colombia when the peace talks broke down. Needless to say, Trump did not name Norway a sponsor of terrorism.

Colombia has since dropped the extradition request and, along with many other countries, has called for the designation to be revoked.

“Cuba is helping us to make peace,” Colombian president Gustavo Petro told Democracy Now! last fall. “It’s just the opposite of what that [sponsor of terrorism] list is all about.”

The terrorism designation adds insult to injury for many Cubans, who for decades were victims of US-backed terrorism.

The 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, which killed seventy-three people, was one of the deadliest acts of terrorism in the Western Hemisphere. The attack is believed to have been masterminded by two former CIA operatives, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch Ávila, both of whom lived into their eighties in South Florida without being prosecuted for the crime in the United States.

In the 1990s, US-based extremists financed and carried out terrorist attacks on Cuba, including bombings at hotels and speed boats strafing beach resorts with machine gun fire.

Disgraced former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), a Cuban-American hard-liner whom Biden deferred to on Cuba policy until he was convicted of bribery last year, had ties to Cuban-American terrorist s .

Menendez supported the legal defense of Cuban-American terrorists, including a gunman belonging to Omega 7, an armed group of anti-Castro Cubans responsible for bombings and assassinations in New Jersey and New York. In the late 1970s, the FBI regarded Omega 7 as “the most dangerous terrorist group” in the United States.

The SSOT designation is one of the most damaging components of the United States’ economic war on Cuba.

Former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, who played a leading role in negotiations with Havana, called SSOT “the most punishing sanction.”

He condemned Biden’s approach as “doubling down” on the Trump administration’s reversal of the Obama thaw, asking, “Why would any Cuban official ever, ever negotiate anything with America ever again after this?” He also charged the Biden administration with “legitimizing” Trump’s destruction of détente and “gaslighting” Cuba.

Businesspeople in Cuba say that the designation’s extraterritorial implications have locked the nation out of the global banking system, amplifying the impact of the raft of sanctions known as el bloqueo, or “the blockade.”

The designation has grown sharper teeth in recent years as banks have expanded their compliance departments in the wake of several money-laundering scandals, according to economists.

“US rules create such a tangle of legal snags that it is simply not worth the time, money, and effort to challenge or circumvent them,” said Emily Morris, a development economist at University College London.

The designation impedes academic and scientific collaboration between Cuba and other countries — something Morris and other academics based in Europe have experienced firsthand. It also impacts tourism, one of Cuba’s primary sources of foreign currency.

In the first ten months of 2024, about 1.7 million tourists visited Cuba, 48 percent fewer than in 2019. Old Havana, which was bustling with visitors from the United States and around the world after the Obama opening, now looks like a ghost town.

The decline in tourism is attributable, in part, to the SSOT designation, which punishes travelers from third countries for vacationing in Cuba.

Citizens of countries who qualify to travel to the United States without a visa under the Electronic System for Travel Authorization waiver program are stripped of that privilege if they visit Cuba. This includes most of Europe, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Chile, among other countries.

Peter Dentry, a British citizen, recently got stuck at Havana’s José Martí International Airport after vacationing in Cuba. As he tried to check in for his return trip to London via Miami, an American Airlines representative told him they couldn’t let him board because of the terror designation.

“But I’m a tourist,” said the bewildered Dentry. “Not a terrorist.”

The SSOT designation is one of the most damaging components of the United States’ economic war on Cuba.

When pressed by journalists and members of Congress to explain why Cuba is still on the SSOT list, officials in the Biden administration have given a variety of contradictory answers. Depending on the day, the designation is “under review,” or Cuba “hasn’t met the requirements,” or there is no plan to review Cuba’s status.

According to Blazakis, the former counterterrorism official, starting a review of the terrorism designation would take minutes and invariably conclude that Cuba does not support terrorism.

First, Secretary of State Antony Blinken would ask the Bureau of Counterterrorism to conduct a “rescission” request to determine if Cuba had sponsored terrorism in the previous six months. The intelligence community would be given two weeks to contribute any relevant information, explained Blazakis.

Next, the Cuban government would be asked to provide letters of assurance — diplomatic notes that demonstrate Cuba does not sponsor terror — in which it would likely cite Cuba’s ongoing cooperation with US security forces in counterterrorism and counternarcotics efforts.

Due to this collaboration, the Biden administration removed Cuba last year from another blacklist that includes those countries considered to not be “fully cooperating” in counterterrorism efforts.

As a result, the US government simultaneously considers Cuba a sponsor of terrorism and a partner in the fight against it.

“That’s a perfect example of the incoherence of the policy,” said William LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University and an expert on US-Cuba relations.

Removing Cuba from the not fully cooperating list riled hard-liners, who worried the SSOT designation would be next.

In a hearing on the issue, Cuban-American hard-liner Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) asked Blinken if the Biden administration had begun the required review for removing the designation. Blinken responded with a word salad that Salazar interpreted as “no.”

While the Biden administration hasn’t repeated Trump’s far-fetched justifications for the terrorism label, it has spun its own.

“The regime has a long track record of egregious human rights abuses, suppression of a free press, suppression of civil society, and other key factors that continue to keep them in that list,” State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel told Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández at a press briefing in 2023 after she asked about SSOT.

When Oliva Fernández pointed out that human rights abuses are distinct from supporting terrorism, Patel brushed her off. “I’m going to work the room a little bit,” he said.

“When Blinken says, ‘they haven’t done what they need to do to get off the terrorism list,’ I don’t even know what the hell he’s talking about,” McGovern told a group of activists on Capitol Hill in 2023. “Cuba’s on there for political reasons. It has nothing to do with the merits.”

Last month, when Salazar again pressed Blinken on whether Cuba — or in her words, “those bastards” — would be removed from the SSOT list during Biden’s final weeks as president, he said, “I don’t anticipate any changes in our policy during this administration.”

Salazar stood up and clapped.

“I find it ironic that the people who are cheering Cuba staying on the list and for even harsher sanctions against Cuba are the same people that constantly bitch about immigration into this country,” said McGovern.

“Cubans are not coming here fleeing persecution,” he said. “They’re coming here because they can’t feed their families, because of the shortages, because of all of the implications of being on this list.”

In recent weeks, a bevy of organizations and individuals — including members of Congress, former diplomats, and Obama administration officials — have made one last push to convince Biden to take Cuba off the terrorism blacklist.

Ben Rhodes and a group of former officials, including former Havana chief of mission Vicki Huddleston, penned a letter to Biden urging a reversal of US policy toward the island, including removing Cuba’s SSOT designation.

The US government simultaneously considers Cuba a sponsor of terrorism and a partner in the fight against it. “As you are aware, the country’s energy grid is failing, child malnutrition is on the rise, basic services are deteriorating and most Cubans have lost hope, precipitating the largest exodus of migrants from Cuba in its history,” they wrote.

Two letters from members of Congress have made the same demand, while civil society groups, elected officials, local governments, labor unions, religious groups, and world leaders — nearly six hundred lawmakers from seventy-three countries — have spoken out against the designation as well.

In October, the designation was cited repeatedly during the annual United Nations (UN) General Assembly vote to condemn the US embargo — for the thirty-second year. This year, only the United States and Israel opposed the UN resolution.

Instead of listening to world leaders and prominent members of his own party, Biden has pandered to hard-liners like Salazar, Menendez, and Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL).

Cuba’s persistence on the SSOT list is the result of “pure political cowardice,” Rhodes said recently.

The designation “was a deliberate, cynical thing by the Trump people, who correctly calculated that the Biden people were too sissy to take it off,” said Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst who served as national intelligence officer for Latin America.

The Biden administration, he said, convinced themselves they could “out-Trump Trump” on Cuba to win Florida, an approach that was “doomed to fail.”

Meanwhile, hard-liners are working to make the designation irreversible. Representative Salazar has reintroduced the FORCE Act, legislation that would prohibit the president from removing Cuba from the SSOT list until the Cuban government is overthrown.

Díaz-Balart has drafted a spending bill that would prohibit the State Department from reviewing the designation at all.

On December 20, exactly one month ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Cuban flags waved in the air outside the US embassy in Havana. Tens of thousands — some brought in buses and others present out of conviction — marched to the embassy, a brutalist-style building that towers over El Malecón, to protest the terrorism designation and Washington’s economic war on their nation.

“It affects us enormously,” Nereida González, a librarian who was marching with her granddaughter, said of the designation. “It has caused us to have many scarcities.”

Iván Barreto López, a twenty-eight-year-old state employee, held a sign that read, “This embassy supports terrorism.”

“Whatever one thinks of the Cuban government’s mismanagement, the hostile policies of the US against Cuba have no moral or legal justification,” said Barreto López.

There is no indication the Biden administration will remove Cuba from the terrorism list in his final days.

Instead, Biden is set to hand back the reins of a policy that has proven counterproductive to US interests — one that has driven Cuba into unprecedented economic collapse, fueled the mass migration of over 850,000 Cubans to the United States, and pushed Havana into ever-closer alliances with Beijing and Moscow, all while failing to produce a single tangible political or electoral benefit to Democrats, even in Florida.

“It makes no sense,” said McGovern. “It’s like we’re stuck in the Cold War, and it’s really an embarrassment.”

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