By Maria Josefina Arce
Joe Biden managed to become president of the United States in 2021 and forgot his electoral promises. The announced change in policy towards Cuba has not materialized; on the contrary, hostility towards the small Caribbean nation persists.
Once again Washington has decided to keep the largest of the Antilles on the unilateral list of countries supposedly sponsoring terrorism, a selection that everyone knows the northern nation makes up as it pleases according to its interests.
As denounced by Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel, the U.S. administration is hiding behind a lie to try to justify the blockade against the Cuban people, which has been condemned on 30 occasions by the UN General Assembly.
An opinion shared by political personalities, governments and peoples. Precisely, the U.S. weekly The Nation pointed out that in Washington everyone knows that Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism, and that this only adds more sanctions to the already long and genocidal economic siege.
An unavoidable aspect on which former U.S. intelligence officials have also referred to and which makes clear the lies and political motivations on which the decision is based. They have affirmed with absolute certainty that it is a fiction created to reinforce the logic of the blockade.
In the last days of Donald Trump's presidency, Cuba was once again unjustifiably included on the list, from which it had been removed in 2015 by the administration of Barack Obama, in which he served as Vice President Biden.
The reality is that the presence of the archipelago in the criticized list reinforces the deterrent and intimidating impact of the economic siege, and the difficulties to insert us in international trade and perform financial operations.
But let's go back to the article in the weekly The Nation, which insists that Havana should be removed from that list, which, it stresses, should be accompanied by other steps such as the removal of the 243 measures imposed by Trump, many of them in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic.
And the fact is that although the current government has taken a series of provisions, described as positive by Havana, the blockade remains intact, including the application of Title III of the Helms Burton Act, which internationalized that unilateral measure almost 27 years ago.
This section allows U.S. citizens to sue any person or entity that does business with properties legally nationalized by the Cuban Revolution.
It is good to clarify that the revolutionary government reached compensation agreements with other countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain and Canada, except with the United States, which refused any understanding, while, as historians recall, it was planning the mercenary invasion of Playa Giron in 1961.
Article III of Helms Burton had been suspended by successive U.S. administrations since the 1996 Congressional passage of the law, but was activated in 2019 by Trump.
However, Biden has also done nothing about it. What is certain is that his promises have been left in the past, the current U.S. president has followed in the footsteps of previous administrations of manifest hostility towards the Cuban people.
