MIAMI, United States. – The Government of the United States will not withdraw the Cuban regime from the list of State sponsors of terrorism, according to the Secretary of State of the northern country, Antony Blinken, after being questioned this Thursday by the Cuban-American congresswoman María Elvira Salazar before the Relations Committee Exteriors of the US House of Representatives.
The island’s regime left that list during the second administration of Barack Obama and returned during the presidency of Donald Trump. At the beginning of March, the Joe Biden administration ratified the permanence of Havana in the group that also includes North Korea, Iran and Syria.
“We do not plan to remove them from the list,” Blinken said Thursday, after questions from Salazar. According to EFEThe US official also explained that the Government could not make that decision because the law of Congress in this regard establishes “very high criteria.”
“What I am committing to is that if there were to be a review, it would be based on the law and the criteria that it establishes, which, as I said, have a very high bar,” Blinken added.
Cuba was initially designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1982 due to its long history of providing advice, shelter, communications, training, and financial support to guerrilla groups and individual terrorists. The State Department said this month.
To keep the Island on the list, the Biden administration took into account the “repeated support” of the Cuban regime for “acts of international terrorism, by granting safe haven to terrorists.”
He also recalled that “citing peace negotiation protocols”, Cuba had refused Colombia’s request to extradite 10 leaders of the National Liberation Army (ELN) who were living in Havana after claiming responsibility for the 2019 bombing of a police academy in Bogotá, which killed 22 people and injured 87 others.
Furthermore, the State Department assured at the time, the Havana regime “hosts several fugitives from United States justice wanted on charges related to political violence, many of whom have resided in Cuba for decades.”
“For example, the Cuban regime refused to return to Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakura fugitive on the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list, who was convicted of the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster.”
