Rubio Signals Trump Is Likely to Return Cuba to Terrorism List

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump’s nominee to be the top US diplomat signaled that the president-elect is likely to reverse President Joe Biden’s decision Tuesday to remove Cuba from a list of state sponsors of terrorism after he takes office next week.

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Cuba is “without a question” a sponsor of terrorism, Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, said in response to questions at his confirmation hearing in Washington on Wednesday. Trump had given Cuba the designation before the end of his first term in 2021, but Biden reversed it on Tuesday.

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Biden’s move was part of a series of steps to ease US policy toward the communist country in a bid to secure the release of political prisoners. In Cuba, the government has begun to release some of the 553 political prisoners it agreed to free as part of its deal with the Biden administration, according to local media reports that cited relatives of the detainees.

But Rubio cited the Cuban government’s support for Colombia’s FARC, a revolutionary group once considered a terrorist organization but removed from that designation in 2021, and its friendliness toward Hamas and Hezbollah as justification for the designation. He also said Cuba hosts foreign spy stations, maintains strong ties to Iran and harbors fugitives from US justice.

“There is zero doubt in my mind that they meet all the qualifications for being a state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio said in response to a question from fellow Cuban-American Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

Rubio said that he didn’t want to speak ahead of the incoming administration because Trump will set foreign policy. But he said of Biden’s Cuba action “nothing that was agreed to is irreversible or binding on the new administration. I think people know my feelings, and I think they know what the president’s feelings have been about these issues when he was president previously.”

--With assistance from Stephen Wicary and Jim Wyss.

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