Not a week had passed before Cuba, which was removed from the US State Department’s State-Sponsor of Terrorism list by the outgoing Biden administration, was placed right back on it by Donald Trump. The move was consecrated on Monday (January 20, 2025) via executive order just hours after Trump was inaugurated for his second nonconsecutive term as head of state. Biden, in his final days in office, had signed an order removing Cuba from the list on January 14, 2025.
“In an act of arrogance and disregard for the truth, President Trump has just reinstated the fraudulent designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism,” posted Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez on X. “This is not surprising. His goal is to continue strengthening the cruel economic war against Cuba for the purpose of domination.”
The move to reinstate Cuba as a state-sponsor of terror came on the same day of the US senate’s unanimous confirmation of Republican Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state. The son of Cuban immigrants to the US, Rubio told the senate panel during his confirmation hearing that “Cuba is literally collapsing both generationally, in terms of all the young people leaving, but it’s also collapsing economically.” While he mentioned a “communist regime” and “Marxism is not working” as reasons for recent electrical blackouts and the overall economic hardships Cuba faces, he said nothing about the nearly sixty-three-year-long blockade imposed on the island by successive U.S. administrations.
ALBA Movimientos released a statement affirming that “there is no legal, political or moral reason that justifies not only the inclusion of Cuba on the spurious list, but the very existence of the list and the role that the US has assigned itself in its preparation: it is an instrument of international blackmail that uses countries according to the dirty interests of American domestic politics and resorts to threats to do so. The existence of the list by no means has the objective of “fighting terrorism,” as this phrase is a euphemism to promote its imperialist policies perpetually.”
The response to the move by the Cuban Ministry of Affairs can be read here.
