US Keeps Cuba on its List of Terrorist Countries
Wilfredo Cancio Isla (Café Fuerte)
HAVANA TIMES — The United States has included Cuba in its list of countries that sponsor terrorism for the thirty-second consecutive year, leaving intact the policy of isolation that has characterized the two countries’ bilateral relations for fifty years.
The US Department of State published on Wednesday its Annual Terrorism Report, which places Cuba alongside Iran, Sudan and Syria.
The document used to designate Cuba is merely three paragraphs long and repeats claims drawn from reports published in previous years, while the reports on the other three nations accused of sponsoring terrorism are detailed and long, with comments on recent incidents.
The arguments used to accuse Raul Castro’s government of terrorism are grounded in two basic points:
The fact Cuba offered safe haven to Patria Vasca y Libertad (ETA) and Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces (FARC) members for a very long time and continues to allow fugitives from US justice to reside on the island, offering them homes, ration booklets and medical attention.
There is, however, no mention whatsoever of the incident involving the North Korean vessel Chong Chon Gang, captured in Panama carrying a cargo of Cuban weapons in July of last year, an incident which prompted a special UN report that compromised Raul Castro’s government.
The US government report acknowledges that Cuba has tried to distance itself from ETA and mentions that at least eight of some 20 members of that organization were repatriated in cooperation with the Spanish government.
The Department of State report indicates that ETA currently has as little as a hundred members but that the organization cannot be said to have been completely dismantled. Washington also points out that there are ETA militants secretly living in Venezuela.
Peace Talks
The chapter devoted to Cuba also acknowledged as a positive development that Havana has hosted the peace talks between the FARC and Colombian government, in coordination with representatives from Venezuela, Norway and the Red Cross.
It also repeated the exact same paragraph from the 2012 report: “There is no indication that the Cuban government provided terrorist groups with weapons or military training.”
In contrast to the 2011 and 2012 documents, this year’s report made no mention of “strategic deficiencies” in Cuba’s banking control mechanisms and of Cuba’s previous refusal to directly collaborate with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in the struggle against money laundering and financial transactions in support of international terrorism.
The removal of these comments seems to respond to the fact Raul Castro’s government issued an anti-terrorist law at the close of last year to “support the committed global struggle against money laundering, the financing of terrorism, the proliferation of weapons and the movement of ill-gotten capitals.”
Decree Law 317 of the Council State came into effect on January 23 this year. It regulates the operations and structures of Cuba’s Bureau of Financial Investigations (DGIOF), tasked with enforcing compliance with the principles and strategies aimed at preventing the use of Cuban banks and financial institutions “as a means for legitimating assets secured through illicit activities.”
The US is the most prolific terrorist nation on the planet, they’ve got some nerve putting inflammatory labels like that on Cuba as they are trying to defend themselves from the US’ oppressive economic assault.
The US doesn’t sell arms to their allies?
Very sad and as the USA keeps this hypocrisy alive we are only losing more and more friends throughout the world. Democracy is not having a group of people located in strategic states dictate such absurdity. I love my Cuban friends throughout the US but please stop the insanity! If we had no embargo Cuba would not be held hostage by the Castro brothers so we’re all on the same page but are reading books from different planets.
Your rant is light on facts.
Huber Matos, who fought in the Escambrey against the Batista dictatorship was thrown in prison for 20 years for daring to call Fidel Castro a communist. His case is by no means unique.
According to Matos, “prison was a long agony from which I emerged alive because of God’s will. I had to go on hunger strikes, mount other types of protests. Terrible. On and off, I spent a total of sixteen years in solitary confinement, constantly being told that I was never going to get out alive, that I had been sentenced to die in prison. They were very cruel, to the fullest extent of the word… I was tortured on several occasions, I was subjected to all kinds of horrors, all kinds, including the puncturing of my genitals. Once during a hunger strike a prison guard tried to crush my stomach with his boot… Terrible things.”
The prisoners at the US Guantanamo Bay detention camp are not kept in solitary confinement. Only a few were subjected to waterboarding. In December 2009, the U.S. reported that, since 2002, more than 550 detainees had been released. The report recommended releasing 126 current detainees to their homes or to a third country, prosecuting 36 in either federal court or by a military commission, and holding 48 indefinitely under the laws of war. In addition, 30 Yemenis were approved for release if security conditions in their home country improve.
You mention Israel saying “they send in their fighter-bomber jet, tanks, bulldozers and raze everything in sight, murder children of any age”. Actually that sounds much more like the army of the Syrian dictator Bashir al Assad who has been praised as a dear friend and ally of Cuba.
Israel has never cut off the water supply to Gaza, although the Hamas terrorists who run the strip like a prison have stolen water pipes to make rockets and bombs.
Bullshit! Show me proof!
The USA can’t forget that the Cuban Communist Party was installing
nuclear weapons in Cuba to destroy America; the communists were even asking the Russian to fire first and wipe out American cities.
Who doesn’t believe that the Cuban government for a few months was dreaming about destroying America and installing a communist regime over there?
Some people may laugh but … the perfect dream for a communist isn’t it?
I can’t forget that Cuba could have been wiped out because the
communists wanted to maintain and spread the communist ideology around the
world. They didn’t care about the people, they wanted power. They didn’t ask the people , it was all done secretly without consultation.
Little by little Cuban communists are losing and their dreams are left behind because they do not represent the aspiration of their nation. America
has stopped Cuba.
The argument of labeling any country terrorist at will and by State Department is a bitter joke. Self appointed Judge and Jury in the State Department, have turned this fake label into a tool of threat and blackmail. Whichever government, be it Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Cuba and any other not of the liking of the US government is liable to become one and removal remain at their mercy.
Not so Israel, the largest jailer in the world with 1.5 million hostages in Gaza, who can drink water only when Israel decides to open the faucet, whose children can go to school or the hospital when goons armed to the teeth decides so, by opening the gates of their electrified fence.
Israel is never label terrorist, although they send in their fighter-bomber jet, tanks, bulldozers and raze everything in sight, murder children of any age or 80 year old paraplegic man in a wheel chair.
The long and murderous arm of MOSAAD travels across the globe and murder at will.
Cuba, (except GITMO) is a terrorist state, although the only place on that island where people are water boarded, incarcerated for over 10 years without charge or trial, kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours, force fed, they still has the gall to call Buchenwald and Treblinka concentration camps.
Although they are the ones flying drones, killing innocent people in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and everywhere in between, the victims, their families are always the terrorists, not the guy pulling the trigger thousands of miles away.
It was quite charitable of the US to not include the Cuban terrorist intervention in the Venezuelan protests. Cuban-trained and armed ‘collectivos’, or better described as hired thugs are used by the Venezuelan government to harass and murder protesters who oppose the Maduro regime.
The Castro clan should have thought twice before trying to sell military equipment to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un! But of course, birds of a feather! And guess what! The ship Chong Chon Gang just sailed again from Cuba.
YAHOO NEWS: North Korea ship in Cuba arms row crosses Panama Canal
http://news.yahoo.com/north-korea-ship-cuba-arms-row-crosses-panama-020342672.html
….lest we forget a certain ill fated North Korean arms shipment.
Why do I always have the word ‘hypocrites’ ruminating whenever I read anything about what the ‘glorious US of A’ is spewing forth. If ever there has been a Nation responsible for terrorising the rest of the planet, it has without doubt been the US of A. Always ready to point the finger at others but in their mass psychotic state they feel a compulsion to meddle when and wherever they feel they like.
Littlemore to say than ‘God Bless NATIVE Americans’.
The continuing listing by the U.S. of Cuba as a terrorist nation is a lie just as it was a lie back in the Reagan era to say that Cuba tried to export its revolution to other countries .
The GOUSA never came up with proof of that either .
It’s a lie
In fact, the so-called GWOT,: The U.S.’s Global War On Terror is in actuality a Global War OF Terror that has no equal in modern times in its range and tactics.
It is a case where the accuser is charging the accused of doing what the accuser does as a matter of long practiced policy.
I do not believe there is a word beyond hypocrisy that can be applied here as apropos as that word would have been.