Demonized and victimized for more than half a century as a consequence of Cold War dynamics, Cuba has finally been removed from Washington’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism.
Acting on a directive from President Obama to review of Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, the state department on Tuesday submitted a report to the White House recommending, ”based on the facts and the statutory standard,” that the President rescind the country designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
”While the United States has had, and continues to have, significant concerns and disagreements with a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions, these concerns and disagreements fall outside of the criteria for designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism,” secretary of state John Kerry said in a statement, adding that the review focused on the narrow questions of whether Cuba provided any support for international terrorism during the previous six months, and whether Cuba has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future, consistent with the statutory standard for rescission.
Actually, the terror rap that Cuba was pinned with had little to do with terrorism as it is known now and everything to do with Cold War geo-politics. When Cuba was originally designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1982, it was, by the state department’s own description, ”because of its efforts to promote armed revolution by forces in Latin America.” This was at a time Washington was, by most accounts, promoting and protecting the most loathsome dictators in the region and beyond, even as its own allies such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia began sharpening the tools of terrorism under the patronage of Reagan’s America.
”Circumstances have changed…Our Hemisphere, and the world, look very different today than they did 33 years ago,” the State Department conceded on Tuesday, adding, ”Our determination, pursuant to the facts, including corroborative assurances received from the government of Cuba and the statutory standard, is that the time has come to rescind Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.” Shorn of defensive bureaucratese, it effectively meant: We were totally wrong.
In fact, rarely, if ever has Cuba been implicated in acts of terrorism the way US allies have been. The terror designation is now shared only by only by Iran, Sudan and Syria, but not by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which are widely seen as the principal exporters of terror.
In fact, Pakistan came perilously close to being designated as a terror sponsor in 1993 but it wheeled back by sacking its pro-jihadi intelligence personnel and presenting itself as a supine US ally for awhile. Its subsequent deployment of terrorists in Kargil and in attacks such as the ones on India’s parliament and Mumbai on 26/11 has not attracted U.S ire the same way as Washington’s hitherto ideological adversaries such as Cuba and Venezuela have.