Center for International Policy

U.S. Leaves Cuba on the List of Terrorist Nations

By Wayne S. Smith, Senior Fellow

How disappointing! One of the easiest and most indicated steps the Obama administration could have taken to signal a more enlightened policy toward Cuba would have been to remove it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Over the past several years, the State Department’s annual reports have presented not a shred of evidence that would justify keeping Cuba on the list (see my reports over the years pointing this out). But given the hide-bound attitude of the Bush administration, no one expected it to remove Cuba from the list. Indeed, given Bush’s protection of the likes of Luis Posada Carriles and other exile terrorists, he may have felt that the less said about terrorism, the better. But now Bush is gone and we have the Obama administration calling the shots. That its reaction, its failure to remove Cuba from the list, is exactly what we would have expected of Bush is dispiriting – and leads one to the conclusion that the people advising Obama on Cuba don’t really know what they are doing. Let us hope that wiser heads in the administration take another look.

Wayne S. Smith is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington. He is former chief of the U.S. interests section in Havana and is author of "The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of the Castro Years."