Leftist President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday he would remove Cuba from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, leaving only Iran, Syria, and North Korea on the list.
Biden claimed in his declaration that Cuba had not sponsored terrorism for six months, apparently enough to remove it from the list.
Cuba has been on the list for most of the years between 1982 and 2025, with the exception of six years between 2015 and 2021 after leftist President Barack Obama – whom Biden served as vice president – removed the communist regime from a list as part of a larger package of concessions to Havana. The Obama concession policy resulted in a dramatic increase in political and religious persecution on the island and served to embolden Cuba to forge deeper relationships with global terror entities such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the government of Iran.
President-elect Donald Trump restored Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2021 on the grounds that the Castro regime maintains relationships with several jihadist terror entities and narco-terrorist militias such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Latin America.
The “state sponsor of terrorism” label comes with hefty economic sanctions and diplomatic limitations. According to the State Department, state sponsors of terrorism face “restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions.”
Trump will be inaugurated into a second term as president on Monday. The Biden administration made the decision with less than a week of its tenure remaining and announced it the day before Trump’s choice to lead the State Department, Cuban-American Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), is scheduled to appear before Congress for confirmation.
Disregarding the substantial evidence that communist Cuba enables terrorist activity around the world, Biden said in his official certification removing the country from the list that Cuba had promised not to do so again in the future.
“The Government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding 6-month period[,]” the official notice reads. “The Government of Cuba has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.”
Prior to official confirmation, the U.S.-based Cuba news outlet Martí Noticias reported, citing three government sources, that Biden had already made the choice to remove Cuba from the list. Martí reported that the concession to the bloody communist regime followed significant intervention and mediation by the Vatican – which, under Pope Francis, has maintained a friendly posture towards the Cuban Communist Party and repeatedly advocated for policies that favor the regime, rather than its victims.
The Miami Herald, citing its one solitary anonymous source, also reported on the lifting of the state sponsorship label, calling it a “last-minute decision.”
The Castro regime, in power for over half a century, has developed deep ties to a variety of global terrorist threats around the world. Its most prominent such relationship was with the FARC, a communist terror organization headquartered in Colombia that killed tens of thousands, with Cuban support, since attempting to foster a communist revolution in the country in the 1970s. Since then, the FARC has evolved into one of the world’s most sophisticated drug trafficking operations. FARC leaders have been invited to march in Cuban regime parades and Cuba facilitated a catastrophic “peace deal” with the Colombian government that granted the terrorists guaranteed Congressional representation in 2016. Biden also removed the FARC’s terrorist designation in 2021.
Cuba also maintains a strong alliance with Iran, the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism, and its proxy terror group Hezbollah. Hezbollah is close to their mutual political ally Venezuela, which reportedly granted its Middle Eastern terrorists genuine, but illegitimate, passports with the help of the Cuban government throughout the 2010s.
The Castro regime has also enthusiastically supported another Iranian terror proxy, Hamas, following the massacre of an estimated 1,200 people and scores of atrocities committed during an invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023. Shortly after the terrorist catastrophe, Cuba held an anti-Israel “concert for peace in Palestine” and displayed a massive light display of the Palestinian flag in the heart of Havana.
“Our country is, and always will be, alongside the cause of the brotherly people of Palestine,” figurehead President Miguel Díaz-Canel declared at the time.
Díaz-Canel has also helped magnify Hamas propaganda against Israel and is helping South Africa’s case against Israel for defending itself against Hamas at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Cuba formalized its participation in the anti-Israel case on Monday, according to the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, Granma.
Prior to October 7, however, terrorism experts have long warned that Cuba as “been providing intelligence to Hamas for decades and holding high level meetings with them, and their main sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
President-elect Donald Trump is widely expected to reverse Biden’s decision after his inauguration.
https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2025/01/14/biden-removes-pro-hamas-hezbollah-tied-cuba-from-state-sponsor-of-terror-list/
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