The United States has no plans to remove Cuba from its blacklist of countries that support terrorism, US diplomatic chief Antony Blinken said Thursday.
“We have no intention of removing them from the list,” Blinken said when asked about it during a hearing before the Republican-dominated House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Definitely no,” he replied again to a Republican elected official to find out if Cuba had taken any action to consider removing the country from that blacklist. “The bar is set very high.”
Former US President Donald Trump ended the policy of opening up towards Cuba initiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, and blacklisted the country again in January 2021.
Upon arriving at the White House in 2021, President Joe Biden vowed to review US policy toward Cuba, but his rhetoric hardened after the July 2021 crackdown on anti-government protests on the island.
“Secretary of State Blinken reaffirms the obvious: the current U.S. administration never intended to reverse Trump’s unfair designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism because it did not fit his policy of economic suffocation,” the Cuban minister responded to Foreign Affairs on Twitter , Bruno Rodriguez.
“Indeed, it confirms that the State Department’s skill lists are nothing more than instruments of political and economic coercion totally unrelated to such sensitive issues as terrorism, religion, human rights, drug trafficking and corruption,” he added.
In addition to the list supporting terrorism, Cuba is on another list, namely the list of countries attacking freedom of religion.
Despite this, the two countries have resumed talks on international crime and migration issues. A high-level US delegation recently visited Cuba.
Washington and Havana resumed talks on immigration in 2022 amid record emigration of Cubans, particularly to the United States.
The American Embassy in Havana resumed full visa issuance for Cubans wishing to settle in the United States in early January.