Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect
Washington, July 27 (RHC)-- The Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect have called on President Joe Biden to remove the Caribbean country from the one-sided U.S. terrorism list.
Being on this list subjects Cuba to a series of devastating international financial restrictions, said activists Medea Benjamin and Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, members of the steering committee of the group Acere, in an article published in the online newspaper LA Progressive.
The demand, through a new solidarity campaign with the largest of the Antilles, intends - they stressed - that Biden reverse the "outrageous designation of the (Donald) Trump era that is unjust, harmful to the Cuban people and damaging to U.S.-Cuba relations."
As the Cuban government celebrates July 26, National Rebellion Day, U.S. groups are demanding that the Biden administration end its cruel sanctions, which are creating so much hardship for the Cuban people, they emphasized.
It is already illegal for U.S. banks to conduct transactions to Cuba because of the economic, financial and trade embargo that also has an illegal extraterritorial reach, reiterated Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink, and Ora Bannan, a human rights lawyer.
When Donald Trump became president (2017-2021), "not only did he impose more than 200 tough new sanctions against the island," but, in the final days of his administration, in an attempt to curry favor with Cuban Americans opposed to normalization of relations, he added Cuba back to this list, they recalled.
Both stressed that Cuba, on the contrary, has been praised for its international cooperation and solidarity, especially in providing health care and medical collaboration to poor countries around the world, including during the Covid-19 pandemic.
"If anything, it is Cuba that has been the victim of international terrorism emanating mainly from the United States," they warned.
The list of violent actions against the island "ranges from the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the hundreds of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro to the shooting down of a Cuban civilian airliner (in 1976)," Benjamin and Ora Bannan insisted.
They also referred to the reception that real terrorists have historically received in U.S. territory, as well as the attacks on Cuban hotels in the 1990s and, more recently, the attack on the embassy of the Caribbean island in Washington.
On the other hand, they denounced that the United States continues to provide millions of taxpayer dollars every year to organizations dedicated to defamation and smear campaigns and to trying to undermine Cuba's sovereignty.
Despite Biden's commitment to review that measure, 18 months after his arrival at the White House, Cuba remains on that list without any justification and his government is obviously "more concerned with Florida policy than with the welfare of the Cuban people," they concluded.
