US Government Returns to Hard Policy Against Cuba

The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, yesterday Friday reinstated the Restricted List of Cuba, a step in the restoration of the “hard” policy of the United States towards the island in the next four years.

In a statement identified ‘Reestablishment of a hard United States-Cuba policy’, the head of US diplomacy not only returned to that list the entities already sanctioned, but added another: Orbit, S.A., a channel for sending remittances to the Caribbean nation.

According to the statement by Rubio - who during his time as a senator was one of the main architects of the policy against Cuba in the United States Congress - Orbit, S.A., is a remittance processing company that “operates for or on behalf of the Cuban military.”

In his first term (2017-2021), Trump imposed at least 243 restrictive measures that reinforced the economic, commercial, and financial blockade that has weighed on the Cuban people for more than six decades and that characterized his government's maximum pressure policy.

Everything you need to know about the Secretary of Genocide against Cuba

Six days before leaving office, Democrat Joe Biden decided to rescind the aforementioned list, remove Cuba from the unilateral list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) and issued a waiver for Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, also known as the Libertad Act, for a period of six months.

In a January 29 letter to the corresponding committees of Congress, the Secretary of State also withdrew “the letter from the previous administration on the Libertad Act,” he said.

Eight days before leaving the White House in 2021, Trump included Cuba on the list, which it had not been on since 2015, a position that Biden maintained until the very end of his term.

But as soon as he returned to the White House, on January 20, the Republican reversed his predecessor's decision. “The president acted on his first day in office to keep Cuba on the SSOT list, where it belongs,” Rubio said in his statement, ignoring the work and criteria of the state agencies themselves that think otherwise.

In a meeting with journalists on Thursday, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary General António Guterres, confirmed in response to a question from Prensa Latina that Cuba must be removed from the list of sponsors of terrorism.

The spokesman stressed that the UN welcomed “the announcement by the United States on January 14 on, among other measures, the withdrawal of Cuba from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.”