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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/07/09/cuba-should-be-removed-from-the-us-list-of-state-sponsors-of-terrorism/">peoplesdispatch.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Cuba should be removed from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism<br></h1>
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<a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/07/09/cuba-should-be-removed-from-the-us-list-of-state-sponsors-of-terrorism/">July 09, 2022</a> by <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/07/09/cuba-should-be-removed-from-the-us-list-of-state-sponsors-of-terrorism/"></a><a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/author/roger-waters/">Roger Waters</a>, <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/author/vijay/">Vijay Prashad</a>, <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/author/manolo-de-los-santos/">Manolo De Los Santos</a>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><p>Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism but a state sponsor of global well-being.
</p><div>
<p>The United States maintains a <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/state-sponsors-of-terrorism-/q5cv15/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">list</a>
of countries that it considers as “state sponsors of terrorism.” There
are currently four countries on that list: Cuba, North Korea, Iran and
Syria. The basic idea behind this list is that the US State Department
determines that these countries have “provided support for acts of
international terrorism.” Evidence about those “acts” are not provided
by the U.S. government. For Cuba, there is not one shred of evidence
that the government has offered any such support to terrorism
activities, in fact, Cuba has—since 1959—been a victim of acts of
terrorism by the United States, including an attempted invasion in 1961
(Bay of Pigs) and repeated assassination attempts against its leaders
(638 times against Fidel Castro).</p>
<p>Cuba, rather than exporting weapons around the world, has a long
history of medical internationalism with Cuban doctors and medicines
being a familiar sight from Pakistan to Peru. In fact, there is an
international <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/ve-the-nobel-peace-prize-73049/q5cv18/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">campaign</a>
for Cuban doctors to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Why would a country
that floods the world with health care be targeted as a state sponsor of
terrorism?</p>
<h3><strong>Washington’s vindictiveness</strong></h3>
<p>Cuba was not on the state sponsor of terrorism list from 2015 onward, when President Barack Obama <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/uba-off-terror-list-index-html/q5cv1c/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">removed</a> Cuba from that list (it was first <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/crs-row-RL32251-pdf/q5cv1g/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">added</a> to
the list in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan). In his last week in
office, and days before Joe Biden was inaugurated to replace him, former
President Donald Trump <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/nsor-terrorism-intl-index-html/q5cv1k/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">put</a> Cuba back on the list on January 12, 2021. The <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/ponsor-of-terrorism-index-html/q5cv1n/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">comments</a>
made by then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo provide a strange
justification for this action: despite Cuba having been removed from the
list in 2015, five years previously, Pompeo said that “[f]or decades,
the Cuban government has fed, housed, and provided medical care for
murderers, bombmakers, and hijackers.”</p>
<p>The phrase “for decades” suggests that the Trump administration went
back beyond 2015, not assessing the situation in Cuba during the five
years since it was removed from the list but going back to an era before
Obama’s action. There was no new evidence of anything having changed
since 2015, which showed that Trump’s actions were purely political (to
curry favor with the hard-right wing that continues to want to conduct
regime change in Cuba and to nullify as many of Obama’s policies as
possible).</p>
<p>The United States has carried out a blockade against Cuba since 1959
when the Cuban Revolution began a process to transform the country that
was ruled by gangsters (including the US mafia) into a country that
tended to the needs of its people. The revolution developed programs for
literacy and health care and for building up the cultural confidence of
the people long suppressed by Spanish and US colonialism. The United
States elite was eager to snuff out the example of Cuba, which showed
that even a poor country could transcend the socioeconomic conditions of
poverty. Each year since 1992, almost all the countries in the
world—184 out of 193 at <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2021-06-23-the-world-says-no-/q5cv1r/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">last count</a>—vote in the United Nations General Assembly to condemn the blockade of Cuba.</p>
<h3><strong>Remove Cuba from the list</strong></h3>
<p>The designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism by the United
States deeply harms the ability of the Cuban government and its people
from carrying on with the basic functions of life. The immense power of
the United States government over the world financial system means that
banks and traders refuse to do business with Cuba since they are afraid
of retaliation by the United States government for breaking the
blockade. It is stunning to learn that because of this blockade, and
despite the murmurs from the US government about medical exceptions,
firms refuse to sell Cuba raw materials, reactive agents, diagnostic
kits, pharmaceutical drugs and devices, and a range of other materials
necessary for operating Cuba’s excellent but stressed public science and
health care system.</p>
<p>US President Joe Biden can remove Cuba from this list with a stroke
of his pen. It’s as simple as that. When he was running for the
presidency, Biden said he would even reverse the harsher of Trump’s
sanctions and revert to the policies of the Obama administration. But he
has not done so, which might be for reasons of political expediency.
There is a streak of vindictiveness that runs through US policies
against Cuba, an island that proved during the pandemic that its
revolutionary process cares for its people. The example of public health
care in Cuba, despite being a small island nation, should be exported
around the world. The country is not a state sponsor of terrorism but a
state sponsor of global well-being.</p>
<p><em>This article was produced by <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-07-08/q5cv1v/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Globetrotter</a>.</em></p>
<p><b>Roger Waters</b> is a musician. He is in the midst of his tour, <i>This is Not a Drill</i>.</p>
<p><b>Vijay Prashad</b> is an Indian historian, editor and journalist.
He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an
editor of <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-07-08/q5cv1y/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">LeftWord Books</a> and the director of <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-07-08/q5cv22/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>. He is a senior non-resident fellow at <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/y2hdjcpo/q5cv25/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies</a>, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/1595583424--tag-alternorg08-20/q5cv28/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i>The Darker Nations</i></a> and <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/1781681589--tag-alternorg08-20/q5cv2c/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i>The Poorer Nations</i></a>. His latest books are <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/s-1869-struggle-makes-us-human/q5cv2g/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i>Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism</i></a> and (with Noam Chomsky) <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/books-withdrawal/q5cv2k/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i>The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power</i></a>.</p>
<p><b>Manolo de los Santos</b> is the co-executive director of the <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-07-08/q5cv2n/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">People’s Forum</a> and is a researcher at <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-07-08/q5cv2r/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>. He co-edited, most recently, <i>Viviremos: Venezuela vs. Hybrid War</i> (<a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/catalog-product-view-id-22050/q5cv2v/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">LeftWord Books</a>/<a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/iremos-venezuela-vs-hybrid-war/q5cv2y/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">1804 Books</a>, 2020) and <i>Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro</i> (<a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/catalog-product-view-id-22524/q5cv32/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">LeftWord Books</a>/<a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/ected-speeches-of-fidel-castro/q5cv35/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">1804 Books</a>, 2021). He is a co-coordinator of the <a href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-07-08/q5cv38/1096508356?h=s0lB2isyY9YH0DNEsDmMe950ck8hEF6135dPx-662A0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">People’s Summit for Democracy</a>.</p>
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