Pompeo Weighs Plan to Place Cuba on U.S. Terrorism Sponsor List - The New York Times - 0 views
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The move would complicate any effort by the incoming Biden administration to resume President Barack Obama’s thaw in relations with Havana.
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A finding that a country has “repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism,” in the State Department’s official description of a state sponsor of terrorism, automatically triggers U.S. sanctions against its government. If added to the list, Cuba would join just three other nations: Iran, North Korea and Syria.
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The State Department removed Cuba from its list of terrorism sponsors in 2015, after President Barack Obama announced the normalization of relations between Washington and Havana for the first time since the country’s 1959 communist revolution, which he called a relic of the Cold War. In return for pledges of political and social reform, Mr. Obama dropped economic sanctions, relaxed restrictions on travel and trade, and reopened an embassy in Havana for the first time in decades. In 2016, he became the first American president to visit the island since Calvin Coolidge.
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They were also willing to accept that the Cuban government has harbored some fugitives wanted in the United States, including Joanne D. Chesimard, 73, a former member of the Black Liberation Army. Ms. Chesimard, who now goes by the name Assata Shakur, remains on the F.B.I.’s list of most wanted terrorists for killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1973.
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Cuba’s repressive government has largely disappointed hopes that it might liberalize after the death of its revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, in November 2016. Havana continues to arrest and detain dissidents and cracked down on a recent hunger strike by artists and other activists in the capital, evidence to many Republicans that its government does not deserve cordial relations from Washington.
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A recent report commissioned by the State Department found that U.S. embassy personnel in Havana were sickened in 2016 by what was most likely a microwave weapon of unknown origins. Cuba’s government has denied any knowledge of such attacks.