Deciphering Joe Biden’s last-ditch Cuba measures

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This article was published 30/01/2025 (413 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the last days before Joe Biden departed the White House, he was somehow persuaded to take a second look at the U.S.-Cuba relationship. All I can say to former president Biden is: that was one long Cuba policy review given that it was initiated in February 2021.

Interestingly, it was very reminiscent of President Donald Trump’s dying days of his first term, when he circumvented U.S. State Department protocols in mid-January 2021 and unilaterally declared the Cuban government a state that sponsored international terrorism. Essentially, it was Trump’s final parting shot to remind Cuban-American voters in Florida of his anti-Cuba bona fides.

Biden, for his part, reversed Trump’s last-minute move by undertaking his own 11th-hour decision to remove Cuba from the state department’s list of countries (which now includes Syria, North Korea and Iran) which sponsor terrorist activities. For all intents and purposes, taking Cuba off the list terminates U.S. financial sanctions against the country and opens up the possibility for Havana to access loans from major banks.

But let’s be clear about one thing: Cuba does not in any way, shape or form engage in state-sponsored terrorism. There’s no credible evidence that exists to validate such a charge. And no one seriously believes that former Colombian guerrillas now living in Cuba (since Havana was working as a mediator to bring peace to violence-plagued Colombia) or fugitives from U.S. justice (who were implicated in U.S., and not international, acts of political violence) have their fingerprints on any recent acts of terror.

As Cuba specialist William LeoGrande of American University told the New York Times: “The statute that creates the terrorism list specifies giving material support to terrorists or harbouring terrorists who are actively engaged in terrorism while you are harbouring them. Cuba just hasn’t done those things.”

The one country, though, that has engaged in terrorist activities is the U.S. itself; and those acts have been directly targeted at Cuba. From outright invasion to planned sabotage and then some — including poisoning livestock, setting off explosives at Cuban hotels and even orchestrating hundreds of assassination attempts.

In addition to removing Cuba’s name from the terror list, Biden reversed Trump’s earlier sanctions against the Cuban Armed Forces, especially those senior members involved in running tourist hotels on the island. Lastly, he announced that he had signed the temporary presidential waiver (for six months) for the Title III provisions of the anti-Cuba Helms-Burton Law that allows Cuban-Americans to sue for damages involving alleged “trafficking” in stolen Cuban property.

In return, the Cubans agreed to gradually release over 550 protesters involved in the July 2021 islandwide demonstrations over widespread shortages and electrical interruptions in Cuba. The Cuban foreign ministry released the following statement: “The releases are carried out on the basis of a careful analysis based on the different modalities contemplated by the legislation, and as part of the fair and humanitarian nature of Cuba’s penal and penitentiary systems.”

One of those released initially was Cuban opposition leader José Daniel Ferrer, who was arrested after participating in the 2021 anti-government protests. In an interview with the Miami Herald, he intoned: “dxscdcfI feel pretty good despite having spent years in truly terrible conditions, suffering beatings, extreme situations, illnesses and isolation.”

Of course, there’s lots of speculation about why Biden would make these moves with so little time left in his presidency. It may be about his presidential legacy or it may very well have been his inclination all along to move away from punishing Cuba, though he demurred in hopes of winning Florida’s 30 electoral college votes. But in the wake of the November presidential election outcome, which showed that the Latino vote went overwhelmingly to Trump, perhaps he felt that he could deviate somewhat from what was largely four years of an ill-defined Cuba policy.

There are those who also believe that Pope Francis and Catholic church officials in Cuba, who were urging Biden to reverse course to facilitate a substantial release of Cuban prisoners, were key players.

Others point to reports that various government leaders, including Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mexico’s former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, who all impressed upon the U.S. president the importance of loosening the economic vice on the Cuban people. Indeed, Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s White House press secretary, maintained that Biden’s decision was influenced by the “wisdom and counsel that has been provided to him by many world leaders, especially in Latin America, who have encouraged him to take these actions, on how best to advance the human rights of the Cuban people.”

Still, Biden’s surprising embrace of former president Barack Obama’s 2014 opening of a “new chapter” in U.S.-Cuba relations is, I suppose, better late than never. Unfortunately, all of these measures are eventually going to be re-imposed on the Cuban government by the Trump White House.

So, when exactly did the Cold War end again?

Peter McKenna is professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.