January 23, 2025

By Elizabeth Naranjo, Granma

On January 14, 2025, President Joe Biden announced that Cuba would be removed from the U.S. government’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list. The slightly edited article below was published by the Cuban newspaper “Granma” on Jan. 17, before President Donald Trump put Cuba back on the list on Jan. 20.

“It could be said that the list has been laid bare as a political instrument of certain U.S. groups, whose fundamental interest is to disable the Cuban government and impose a cost to the interest — of the international community and of the vast majority of the United States — of having a mutually beneficial relationship with Cuba,” said Rodney González Maestrey, director of the Directorate of Legal Affairs and Analysis of the Cuban Foreign Ministry’s General Directorate of the United States, when discussing the recent decision of U.S. President Joe Biden to remove Cuba from the list of alleged state sponsors of terrorism.

The official explained that this norm was also intended to broaden the legal basis for additional punitive legislation against the Cuban people and to establish the idea that the largest of the Antilles [the term includes almost all the islands in the Caribbean Sea] was a threat to U.S. security and that it was acting against the interests of this government.

Regarding the effect of the measure, he stressed that it will not be immediate, “since there are Congressional procedures that must be complied with.”

How did the inclusion in this list affect Cuba?

“Immediately, in the weeks following the inclusion of the Island in that list, in January 2021, the Cuban Government lost more than 40 relations with financial and banking entities,” [González Maestrey] recalled and continued that in the course of the last four or five years, the country experienced the refusal of more than a thousand financial banking institutions.

[González Maestrey] said: “We have to consider that the United States dominates the international financial scenario, so its tentacles reach the world’s financial banking entities, most of which were created by the design of its government,” he emphasized. For example, he noted, tourism, which is one of the branches that generates more income and has a dragging effect on other sectors of the Cuban economy, greatly affected the flow of European visitors.

In 2023, he reviewed, the Caribbean region experienced a boom in this sector; however, for Cuba, it was the opposite. Tourism from Europe decreased in that year, as a direct consequence of the inclusion and maintenance, by the U.S., of a visa waiver program for 41 countries, mainly from the European Union and Asia.

“Those travelers who are subject to or benefit from this program do not have to apply for a visa to travel temporarily to the United States, but as of the inclusion of Cuba in the arbitrary list, those who decided to visit the Caribbean island had to apply for a visa in advance to enter the United States; a process that was cumbersome, due to the time delay, causing most travelers from the Old Continent to decide to change their destination.”

[González Maestrey] added that the designation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism also damaged a practical component of the bilateral relationship in the area of law enforcement and compliance, since, on the one hand, the United States kept Cuba on this list but at the same time sought and recognized the importance of Cuban cooperation in this area, especially in drug interdiction, information exchange and national security of both countries.

On the contrary, he recalled when, in 2015, a lending entity (which measures international credits) decided to upgrade Cuba’s position to favorable, [because of] the simple fact that, at that time, the archipelago and the Northern nation were involved in the normalization process.

“This sent a direct signal to the business and investment world, which caused foreign investors to start taking a more acute interest in the Cuban market.”

González Maestrey said the inclusion “immediately elevated something known as ‘country risk,’ which is a fundamental element that foreign investors consider when doing business with any nation, including Cuba.”

Restricted entities and the Helms-Burton Act

In dealing with the revocation of the other two measures, [González Maestrey] reaffirmed the consequences of the application of the list of restricted entities, which included the entire Cuban business fabric, prohibiting them from any transaction with U.S. companies, as well as the prohibition of lodging U.S. citizens in most Cuban hotels, including private hostels.

The specialist recalled that Title III of the Helms-Burton Act was reactivated in 2019 by the same [U.S] government, after all preceding administrations had failed to put it into effect since this legislation was passed in 1996, as part of its foreign policy towards Cuba.

The clause, he stressed, was aimed at discouraging foreign direct investment, when the island was depending — in the 1990s — on this alternative as a very important component of the Cuban economy.

He argued: “This title opened the possibility for individuals in the United States to file lawsuits in U.S. courts against entities that have negotiated with properties that were confiscated or nationalized — as it is written in that law — by the Cuban Revolution in its early years.”

González Maestrey concluded that these decisions constitute a recognition of the failure of the U.S. government’s Cuba policy approach, designed to surgically identify, through maximum economic pressure, external sources of income, make the economy suffer and deteriorate the living standards of the Cuban population.