Biden hits back at Trump's Cuba stunt

After Donald Trump's election victory and his secret conviction that he could have done much better than his vice-president Kamala Harris, Biden began his last two and a half months in the White House by pardoning his own son, and now he has just taken Cuba off the list of countries that promote terrorism.

This is a major decision. It was precisely his predecessor - and imminent successor - Donald Trump who reintroduced Cuba to the list shortly before the end of his tumultuous last days in office.

The island, ruled by the Castro regime since 1959, had been included on the list in 1982 at the behest of US President Ronald Reagan, who had already decided on his ultimately successful strategy of winning the Cold War and defeating the Soviet Union and communism.

It was another Democratic president, Barack Obama (2009-2017), who decided to take the step of giving the Cuban regime a chance and remove it from the list of countries that promote terrorism in 2015.

Havana promised not only that it would no longer promote neo-communist totalitarian regimes in Latin America and Africa, but also that it would proceed to a gradual opening in terms of both individual and collective freedoms and a certain liberalisation of the economy. Obama himself sealed the thaw by becoming the first US president to travel to Cuba in 88 years in 2016.

The lifting of US sanctions and restrictions was not matched by the liberalisation of the Cuban regime, whose activism in favour of a Latin America turned to the left and far left was exacerbated in countries such as Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Under Biden, and with Miguel Diez Canel installed as Cuba's president, under the relentless supervision of Raúl Castro and his inner circle of power, the largest peaceful protests on the island took place in July 2021. Thousands of people, claiming to have nothing to lose under a totalitarian and police-like regime, took to the streets. Despite the orderly and peaceful nature of the protests, the Castro regime violently repressed them, imprisoned thousands of detainees and sentenced more than a thousand to brutal prison terms of more than 20 years.

Now, according to Biden Administration officials, ‘a significant number of those prisoners will be released in relatively short order’ in return for the US president's gesture. If the fulfilment of such a promise follows the same pattern as usual for the Castro regime, it is likely that these prisoners will spend much of their lives in Cuba's dreary prisons. For its part, the Havana government, which describes Biden's decision as going ‘in the right, albeit limited, direction’, puts the number of prisoners it will ‘gradually’ release at 553, ‘imprisoned for various crimes’. This ‘correct decision’ is also accompanied by the lifting of some financial sanctions and the suspension of the Helms-Burton Act, which allows US citizens to claim in US courts the expropriation of their property in Cuba after Fidel Castro took power in 1959.

The measure adopted by the still-president Biden is clearly a preemptive move to pre-empt the tougher policy towards Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua outlined by Donald Trump's Secretary of State, to be headed by Cuban-American Marco Rubio. His colleague, the Republican senator for Texas, Ted Cruz, has already denounced ‘the unacceptable decision’ to remove Cuba from the list of countries that support terrorism, and directly blames Biden for ‘undermining’ the work of Donald Trump's future government and of Congress, whose two Houses have a Republican majority.

A few days before Trump takes the reins of the country and perhaps decides to reverse Biden's decision, it is worth noting that both the Democratic president and the Cuban regime have praised the mediating role of the Vatican, highlighting the performance of the Catholic Church in the agreement. Such praise should be greeted with great caution when dealing with these interlocutors. The persecution that the Church suffers, with varying degrees of intensity, both in Cuba itself and in Venezuela and Nicaragua, depending on the needs of their respective neo-communist regimes, warns that excessive optimism can quickly lead to melancholy.