14 April 2015: Obama announces the removal of Cuba from the ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’ list, on which it had languished since the Reagan era. 12 January 2021: the outgoing Trump Administration reinstates it; the incoming Biden Administration doesn’t demur. 14 January 2025: an outgoing Biden at last removes it. On 20 January 2025 – less than a week later – the incoming Trump reinstates it. Since Title 50 of the United States Code requires a delay of 45 days, Biden’s departing gesture was completely empty. Yet the farcical flip-flops of US Cuba policy have very real effects on everyday life in the weatherbeaten socialist state across the water from Miami, where the terrorism list helped – for example – deprive patients of access to ventilators at the peak of the Covid pandemic. The designation means that any entities trading with Cuba can be hit by massive US fines. As a result, banks refuse to process Cuban payments, making it difficult for emigrants to send remittances home and depriving the country of international finance.
If there is more protection from such misfortunes for the handful who have made it rich from the pockets of marketisation that have developed since Cuba started liberalising in the 2010s, those who are hurt most are ordinary people. This was always by design, as in Lester Mallory’s 1960 Memorandum, which laid out the justifications for an embargo that would soon be implemented by Eisenhower. Since the still-new revolution had high levels of popular support, the path to defeating it lay in eroding that support, and the
only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … [It] follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
This is how the rationale goes: if Cuba does not respect its citizenry’s human rights, it is necessary for the beacon of said rights across the water to starve those citizens into revolt. This is a special kind of tough love for the ordinary Cuban that emanates in particular from Florida and New Jersey fogies still embittered over things lost in the revolution; one deep enough to perdure for two thirds of a century, despite being forever in vain – those ordinary Cubans having bafflingly failed, decade after decade, to overthrow their government, however much hunger and desperation they are subjected to. According to the Miami logic, the best way to support Cubans’ struggles for justice is to deprive them of kidney dialysis machines and undermine their food rations. Of course, what human rights means here varies somewhat depending on which side of the Straits of Florida you’re on.
When the first Trump Administration reimposed the ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ designation, Pompeo justified this on the basis of Havana’s hosting of US fugitives and political support for Maduro’s regime in Venezuela – neither of which involve support for terrorism, according to US law. Cuba has also granted safe haven to Colombia’s ELN – as part of internationally recognized peace negotiations, backed by the Obama Administration and the Vatican, aimed at ending ‘terror’ in Colombia.
For years, the actual consensus among State Department officials has been that the sponsor of terrorism classification is nonsense. In the words of Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell in the Bush Administration: ‘It’s a fiction we have created . . . to reinforce the rationale for the blockade’. Even Blinken – he who superintended the mass slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s population – apparently agreed. Meanwhile, since the fiasco of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA has plotted with Cuban thugs and mafia types to perpetrate assassinations, paramilitary raids and sabotage – including blowing up a Cuban passenger flight over the Caribbean in 1976, killing 73 people. And the US has used its naval base at Guantánamo – appropriated at the end of the Spanish–American War in the name of maintaining ‘the independence of Cuba’ – to hone the techniques and defences of torture for its global archipelago of ‘dark sites’.
When Cuba erupted in demonstrations in July 2021, due to the conjoined effects of the Covid pandemic, the Trump–Biden sanctions and a worsening macro-economic situation, the State Department seized the opportunity. Perhaps now, finally, the logic of Mallory’s Memorandum would have its day! Portrayed as political dissidents in an authoritarian country, some of those arrested in 2021 and other prisoners became the bargaining chips in negotiations mediated, as has long been typical between Cuba and the US, by the Holy See. Though Biden would – strangely – present as unilateral what he ultimately offered on 14 January, the coincidence of this with a mass release of those prisoners on the Cuban side seems to indicate that the terrorism list was on the table.
The Cuban negotiators would not have been blind to the probability that this offer would be a fleeting one – the latest one-two punch of US Cuba policy – given that it was generally assumed that Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for the State Department, would put Havana back in the crosshairs. The Cubans, presumably, were playing a different game – perhaps one in which relations with other countries or blocs were also at stake. And we shouldn’t assume those prisoners were destined for indefinite incarcerations anyway: though it generally plays well in the Western media to pretend otherwise, after a decade of sputtering reforms, Cuba is a somewhat different country these days. Smartphones and internet usage have proliferated in recent years, and political discourse is relatively unconstrained – with evangelicals, for example, able to mobilise en masse against progressive legislation on gender and reproductive rights. Even if it wanted to, it seems reasonable to assume that the Cuban state does not have the means to exhaustively monitor and keep in check a population now immersed in Facebook, WhatsApp and the like. It has rather more pressing priorities – like the food shortages and power cuts plaguing the island. Indeed, given that the digital aspects of the blockade partially enclose it in a kind of external ‘great firewall’ which can make access to large parts of the internet challenging, the major censor in Cuba is currently the United States government.
Why did Biden wait so long to undo Trump’s measure? Of course, it wasn’t out of character for a Democratic administration that preserved or extended many of the geopolitical policy shifts of its Republican predecessor. But did he think that a bit of Cuba-bashing might play well in Florida, which Obama had taken from Bush, and which Trump won on relatively small margins? Was he beholden to Cuba hawks in his own party like the sleazy New Jersey Senator, Bob Menendez, who fell off his perch last year, convicted of corruption for working on behalf of Egypt and Qatar? Biden’s eleventh-hour turnaround – with Florida already lost and Menendez gone – might seem to indicate that these were factors. Or perhaps it was an implicit bid to recoup, with a valueless token, the meaning of an impending prisoner release on the Cuban side as the apparent result of hard-bargaining democracy-promoters?
We may never unravel the mysteries of this abject gesture. What matters now is what a second Trump term, with Rubio as Secretary of State, is going to look like. Across the Straits from Rubio’s home state, they will be anticipating the worst. Cuba is always embargoed but it makes a big difference how: literal naval blockade during the Missile Crisis; terrorism list; digital blockade; Title III of the Helms-Burton act. The latter, which Biden also revoked, and which aims to scare investors away by making them legally liable in US courts for trafficking in property confiscated during the revolution, seems to have been neglected so far in the spectacle of Trump’s first days. It probably won’t last long. Verbiage about human rights and democracy-promotion will likely give way to simple chest-thumping – of the sort already seen in Congressman Carlos Gimenez’s threat to ‘PULVERIZE the regime once & for all’ – though it’s unclear how well that will serve the US agenda. A more effective tool has long been the preferential treatment given to Cuban immigrants, which helps drain the island’s qualified, working-age population, with significant implications for its economy and the society at large. But that may come into conflict with a Republican base that struggles to see virtues in any immigration: another version of the contradiction over H-1B visas that was pitting different kinds of Trump supporters against each other even before he had taken office. May the contradictions multiply.
Read on: Ernesto Teuma, ‘A New Left in Cuba’, NLR 150.