Is Joe Biden’s Cuba Move Too Little, Too Late?
Yesterday Joe Biden announced Cuba’s removal from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list and eased sanctions against the country. Donald Trump may soon undo the progress.
President Joe Biden delivers a speech about his foreign policy achievements in the Ben Franklin Room at the State Department's Harry S. Truman headquarters building on January 13, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
In a surprise move, President Joe Biden announced yesterday that his administration will remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List. In addition, Biden suspended Title III, a controversial law that had stifled foreign investment to Cuba, and he eliminated a “restricted list” of Cuban entities that included dozens of hotels.
The moves, which would have been momentous for US-Cuba relations if they had come four years earlier, could soon be rendered meaningless.
“The Title III suspension and removing Cuba from the terrorism list won’t even go into effect until after Trump’s inauguration. Both can be reversed by Trump on Monday,” said William LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University and an expert on US-Cuba relations. “These would have been great moves in the first week of the Biden administration rather than the last.”
Yesterday the Biden administration described these moves as “unilateral steps,” but they appear to have been a quid pro quo. A Biden official said he expected the measures would lead to the release of “the many dozens of Cubans arrested in connection with the July 2021 protests.” Later on Tuesday, Cuba’s president Miguel Díaz-Canel posted on X/Twitter that his country was taking the “unilateral and sovereign decision” to release “553 people sanctioned for a variety of crimes.”
Both Cuba and the United States said the Catholic Church had played a central role in securing the release of the prisoners.
Too Little, Too Late?
There is “no credible evidence at this time of ongoing support by Cuba of international terrorism,” said a senior administration official at a background press briefing on Tuesday. There was also no credible evidence that Cuba supported terrorism when Trump put it on the list eight days before he left office.
Biden, who as vice president had been a part of Barack Obama’s historic rapprochement with the island, was expected to revoke Cuba’s terror designation. Instead, he ignored calls to remove Cuba from the list that came from across the political spectrum — including the United Nations, former top US officials, and members of his own party — until now.
“It’s a positive event,” said Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat. “Unfortunately, it might have come too little too late.”
Besides removing Cuba from the terrorism list, the Biden administration also suspended Title III of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act. Title III allows US claimants whose property was nationalized during the Cuban Revolution to sue companies for doing business on that property.
Dozens of lawsuits were filed against US and European companies after Trump activated Title III in 2019. The lawsuits served as a deterrent to investors afraid of being dragged into US courts, further isolating Cuba.
Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, Title III, and the raft of other sanctions imposed by Trump and maintained by Biden, have helped devastate Cuba’s economy and fueled unprecedented migration to the United States.
Hard-liners React
According to LeoGrande, Trump can reverse the terrorism list designation and the Title III suspension any time.
The same goes for the restricted entities list, although the Trump administration “may want to wait and craft a new set of regulations that go beyond what they did in 2017 and that would take several months,” said LeoGrande.
The two key figures who shaped Trump’s Cold War–era policy during his first term are back for the sequel. Cuban American hardliners Marco Rubio and Mauricio Claver-Carone are set to become secretary of state and special envoy for Latin America, respectively.
Claver-Carone indicated a reversal of Biden’s moves may not be immediate. “There’s a process, so it will take time, but in the meantime we can take other measures that will have even greater impact,” he told the New York Times.
Even if Trump does not immediately reverse Biden’s moves, it is not expected they will have an impact any time soon. Foreign banks and companies wary of engaging with Cuba are unlikely to change their mind with Rubio and Claver-Carone running Latin America policy.
Meanwhile, the US embargo against Cuba remains firmly in place.
“If the decision to take Cuba off the terror list is kept by the Trump administration, it would be a significant win for Cuba,” said Alzugaray. “But it doesn’t change the basic problem: the economic war that the United States carries out against Cuba.”
All signs point to the Trump administration ramping up this war, with support from a Republican-controlled Congress.
“We’re going to be reminding Trump of [Cuba’s terror list removal] on Monday when he takes office,” said Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) in a video posted on X/Twitter along with fellow Cuban American hard-liners Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL) and Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL). “Trump can reverse that the following week, so maybe the Cubans will have a very short party and it is only a couple of weeks off the list of terrorist countries.”
An indication of how Trump will respond to Biden’s final-hour moves could come as soon as this morning, when Rubio’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee begin.