After a five-year hiatus, the State Department on Monday returned Cuba to its list of state sponsors of terrorism. What took so long?
Since 1979, the state’s practice of listing “countries providing repeated support for acts of international terrorism”. President Reagan added tropical communist rule in 1982. Cuba remained nominated until President Obama removed it from the list in 2015. Campaign to normalize relations. But Havana does not want to be normal, and it has deepened and broadened its commitment to terrorism.
The decline of Venezuela’s democracy in two decades has been driven out of Havana by Cuba’s military-intelligence system. Sovereignty, once a South American nation, is essentially a Cuban satellite used as a base for international crime and terrorism. A 2019 report by the State Department of Bureau of Countertransism found that “Cuba and Venezuela continue to provide an environment allowing for terrorists.”
The report noted that “individuals linked” to disgruntled members of the Colombian drug-trafficking group FARC, “who remain committed to terrorism despite the peace deal,” as well as the small rebel National Liberation Army (ELN) and “Hezbollah sympathize” Keepers “. In Venezuela. Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro, who remains in power in Cuba, has “openly welcomed former FARC leaders who have announced a withdrawal of terrorist activities,” the report said.
Cuba also welcomes and protects terrorists at home. “Members of the ELN who had been in Havana to hold peace talks with the Colombian government since 2017 also remained in Cuba,” the report found. “Cuba declined request for extradition of 10 ELN leaders from Colombia citing peace negotiation protocol, as that group claimed responsibility for the January 2019 bombing of the Bogota Police Academy, which killed 22 people and 87 others Was injured. “
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