The United States removed Cuba from its list of countries that “do not fully cooperate with counterterrorism efforts,” according to a new State Department report cited by several Florida media outlets.
The new report would claim “that the circumstances that led to certifying Havana as not fully cooperating in these efforts had changed from 2022 to 2023 and that therefore it could no longer certify the island as not fully cooperating on the anti-terrorism issue under the Arms Export Control Act in calendar year 2023,” as quoted by America Tevé.
U.S. law establishes specific legal criteria for rescinding a nation’s designation as a sponsor of terrorism and therefore, “any review of Cuba’s status on that blacklist would be based on the law and criteria established by the U.S. Congress”.
For three consecutive years, until the report referred to 2022, Washington has kept Cuba on the list.
After this news was released, according to the source, Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar reacted in a statement saying that “this is, without a doubt, a new sign that the Biden Administration is paving the way to remove Cuba from the list of Sponsors of Terrorism”.
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According to the statement, Secretary of State Antony Blinken keeps North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela on the list according to the Arms Export Control Act report for the year 2023.
The decision to remove Cuba from the list comes just weeks after Washington and Havana met in the U.S. capital to discuss human trafficking.
Meanwhile, other sources stress that the State Department clarifies that “the designation of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SST), which includes Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba, is independent of the certification process of the NFCC”, or “Non-Fully Cooperating Countries”, according to its acronym in English.
Even so, it could be considered, according to Café Fuerte, as “a first step” towards exclusion from the other list, which entails severe economic and financial restrictions for the island since 2021, the year it was included again, under the Trump Administration. In 2015 Barack Obama had removed the island from the list, which had remained since 1982.
