Why is Joe Biden finally removing Cuba from the list of terrorist states?

Better late than never, it seems. Joe Biden therefore waited until the last days of his presidency to remove Cuba from the list of states supporting terrorism, on which Donald Trump had placed it during the last days of his mandate, in January 2021. After his swearing in, Monday January 20, the Republican president should work to put the Big Island back on the infamous list. In the meantime, a first question arises: why such a late epiphany?

Nothing since Obama?

Cuba is one of the only geopolitical issues on which Joe Biden has not taken the same path as Barack Obama, of whom he was nevertheless vice-president, particularly involved in foreign policy. In December 2014 – a month after the mid-term elections, the last election of the presidency of the first black president in the history of the United States – relations between the two countries took an unexpected turn.

On December 17, 2014, after months of secret negotiations, Barack Obama and Raul Castro announced, in speeches delivered at the same time, this historic rapprochement, notably marked by the reestablishment of diplomatic relations.

A few months before leaving the White House, Barack Obama made a visit to Cuba in March 2016, the first for an American president in eighty-eight years. This should make “irreversible” the new relationship.

In November 2016, however, the latter sank in the polls of the United States, particularly those of Florida, with the election of Donald Trump. The state, the most important of the swing states, voted for the latter after twice offering its electors to Barack Obama.

A meager progress before the return of Trump

The Republican attacks on the “normalization” of relations with Cuba had clearly reached the Cuban-American community of the “sunshine state”. Learned from the lessons of this debacle, Joe Biden undoubtedly wanted to prevent his camp from paying too heavy an electoral price again, in November 2020.

It is for both domestic political reasons – flattering his base in a state now firmly anchored to the Republican camp – and foreign ones – aggressive unilateralism – that Donald Trump should invalidate Joe Biden’s announcements. In the New York TimesMauricio Claver-Carone, Donald Trump’s envoy for Latin America, has not left a shadow of doubt about the attitude of the next administration: “Whether it was Venezuela last year or Cuba today, the Biden administration seems to relish fake deals that favor anti-American authoritarian regimes. »

John S. Kavulich, president of the United States-Cuba Economic and Trade Council, a business group, declared that American companies would not change their position with regard to Cuba, believing that the decision would probably be canceled as soon as Marco Rubio “would hand President Trump a pen.” The new Secretary of State, son of Cuban immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1956, is the first “hawk” on the subject.