In a last-minute move before he leaves office next week, President Joe Biden removed Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, lifted sanctions on companies run by Cuba’s military and again suspended a provision in a law that allows Cuban Americans to seek compensation for confiscated property on the island.
In a call with reporters, a senior administration official said Biden notified Congress on Tuesday that the State Department was removing Cuba from the terrorism-sponsor list. The White House was also “rescinding” a 2017 Trump-era memorandum that was the backbone of a policy to impose sanctions on the Cuban military and its multiheaded conglomerate, GAESA, that controls much of the island’s economy, including tourism.
“The principal impact of this rescission is that it would eliminate the so-called restricted list,” the official said without explaining that the list, currently hosted by the State Department, includes only companies controlled by GAESA.
The official said that President Biden is also suspending Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, a provision that allows Americans to sue a company if it is benefiting from property confiscated by the Cuban government without compensation. Each U.S. president has suspended the provision since the law was signed by Bill Clinton in 1996 until the suspension was lifted by President Donald Trump in 2019.
The three measures announced Tuesday were described as “unilateral” actions taken by President Biden as a “gesture of will” to facilitate a deal mediated by the Catholic Church that would lead to the release of Cuban political prisoners, including people who took part in the island-wide July 11, 2021, demonstrations, a senior administration official told reporters.
“It is our understanding that the Catholic Church has significantly advanced an agreement with Cuba to undertake a set of actions that will allow for the humanitarian release of a significant number of political prisoners in Cuba and those who have been detained unjustly,” the official said.
The Cuban government has engaged “directly in dialogue” with the Catholic Church, the official said, but did not explain if the U.S. has participated in the exchanges. He also did not say how many prisoners were expected to be released nor when.
“Today’s actions demonstrate that President Biden’s Cuban policy, which is focused on achieving practical results with respect to human rights in Cuba, will pay dividends for the Cuban people,” he said.
But Tuesday’s measures are likely to be short-lived: The incoming Trump administration is packed with Cuba hardliners, including the likely next secretary of state, Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, who was personally involved in shaping some of the policies that were undone Tuesday — in particular the sanctions against the Cuban military.
Cuba was included on the list of nations that sponsor terrorism in one of the last policy decisions made by the Trump administration in 2020, citing Cuba’s harboring of Colombian terrorists and Americans fleeing justice.
The Cuban government has claimed that the inclusion on the list has made it harder to get access to the international banking system and has contributed to the deterioration of the economic situation on the island. Havana had been actively wielding a campaign to get removed from the blacklist, enlisting regional presidents like Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and former Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to lobby President Joe Biden on their behalf.
Other former left-leaning presidents from the Americas and Spain, former U.S. diplomats and advisers to former President Barack Obama, and Democratic lawmakers who favor engagement with the Cuban government urged Biden to remove Cuba from the list to alleviate the humanitarian situation of the population and curb migration, which has reached historic proportions.
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