Guerrilla peace talks in Cuba—a terrorist nation?

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Would it surprise you to know that Cuba is officially listed by the United States as a State Sponsor of Terrorism?

The other three countries that carry such a designation are Iran, Sudan and Syria. (Libya was taken off the list in 2006; North Korea in 2008.)

According to the 2011 report by the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterrorism: ”In order to designate a country as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, the Secretary of State must determine that the government of such country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.”

Fair enough.

Iran and Syria are easy to understand, and perhaps even Sudan, not least for providing “lethal support, including weapons, training, funding, and guidance, to Iraqi Shia militant groups targeting U.S. and Iraqi forces, as well as civilians [and] training and arms shipments to the Taliban in Afghanistan.”

Cuba was designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1982 following two decades of support for revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America.

But that was then!

As the State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism concluded years ago, Cuba’s active sponsorship of terrorist/revolutionary activities ceased two decades ago.

Cuba is retained on the list officially simply because “the Cuban government continues to provide safe haven to several terrorists.”

As the 2011 report states: “Current and former members of Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA) continue to reside in Cuba… One of them, José Ignacio Echarte, is a fugitive from Spanish law and was also believed to have ties to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)… There was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training for either ETA or the FARC...[plus]... The Cuban government continued to permit [Black Panther] fugitives wanted in the United States to reside in Cuba and also provided support such as housing, food ration books, and medical care for these individuals.”

Sure enough ETA fugitives are present. I had a very scary chance meeting with one in a bar in Santa Clara about eight years ago. And several former Black Panther and Puerto Rican independence movement fugitives still reside in Cuba.

But as Brig. Gen. John Adams recently pointed out (see here), the ETA fugitives are there under an agreement with the Spanish police, which even maintains an ETA monitoring presence in Cuba.

As to the Black Panthers, although Cuba has welcomed them for political reasons, there is no current extradition treaty between the USA and Cuba. It’s also worth remembering that many countries (including Australia and most European countries) will not extradite suspects for crimes of a political nature nor where the death penalty may be imposed on the suspect. I happen to be writing this from Costa Rica, where FBI fugitive Robert Vesco was able to live safe from extradition for many years. He eventually washed up in Cuba where, ironically, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison (where he died in 2007) for fraud.

And FARC, the Colombian leftist revolutionary movement?

Well, not only has Cuba not supported FARC in 20-plus years, just last week Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced that the Cuban government has been hosting secret negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC in an effort to end the decades-long guerrilla war waged by FARC.

The talks in Havana were apparently brokered by Cuban and Norwegian officials.

So, far from being a sponsor of terrorism, Cuba is now a broker of peace talks, which are scheduled to commence in Oslo on October 5, 2012.

A Reuters report says that President Obama was informed of the talks and was in agreement.

Surely this further undercuts the flimsy rationale for maintaining Cuba on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism.

And how ironic that the day that Santos announced that Cuba was a neutral ground for peace talks coincided with the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, where the Party’s stale foreign-policy platform reiterated the old claim: "The anachronistic regime in Havana is a mummified relic of the age of totalitarianism, a state-sponsor of terrorism."

As the Cuba Central Newsblast (August 31, 2012) correctly noted, there’s a troubling dichotomy when the Obama administration “argues in public that having the FARC in Havana is a cause of keeping Cuba on the terror list, even as Mr. Obama approves in private a peace process brokered in Cuba to have the FARC and Colombia sit together to make peace.”

I say it’s time to take Cuba off the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism.

But this is election year, and the extremist Cuban-American lobbyists and other Cold War warriors are having none of it.

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