Six days. That is how long Cuba’s reprieve lasted.
Cuba's removal from the US State Sponsor of Terrorism list lasted just six days before Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio relisted it. How the designation functions as a financial blockade tool, not a counter-terrorism measure.
Six days. That is how long Cuba’s removal from the United States’ State Sponsor of Terrorism list lasted.
On 14 January 2025, the Biden administration removed Cuba from the list as part of a deal brokered by the Catholic Church: 553 Cuban prisoners released in exchange for the designation being lifted. Six days later, on Inauguration Day, Marco Rubio announced the relisting. Rubio, the new Secretary of State, is the son of Cuban émigrés and has been the Senate’s most consistent architect of blockade policy for the past decade.
The prisoners were already free. The list was back. The blockade tightened again before Biden’s removal order had dried.
This is not chaos. It is the system working exactly as it was designed.
The list is not a counter-terrorism instrument
The State Sponsor of Terrorism designation carries specific legal consequences. It bans US arms exports, restricts dual-use goods, eliminates US economic assistance, and, most damaging in practice, triggers a chilling effect on third-country banks and shipping companies that do not want to touch Cuba-related transactions and risk secondary sanctions from the Office of Foreign Assets Control. The result: European banks refuse to process payments for food imports. Shipping companies cancel contracts. Remittance providers lose their correspondent banking relationships. Cubans cannot receive money from relatives abroad reliably or cheaply.
None of that is an incidental side-effect. It is the mechanism. The designation is a financial strangulation tool, and it is deployed accordingly.
Cuba was placed on the SST list in 1982 under Reagan. Obama removed it in 2015 as part of the diplomatic normalisation. Trump’s first administration relisted it in January 2021, nine days before leaving office, citing Cuban support for Venezuelan security services and the presence in Havana of Colombian ELN and FARC-dissident figures. Biden kept it on the list for nearly four years before the prisoner deal. Trump’s second administration relisted it on day one.
The list has been on, off, and on again entirely according to domestic US political calculation, not according to any stable assessment of Cuban conduct. That is not what a counter-terrorism instrument looks like. It is what a political tool looks like.
Helms-Burton and the statutory requirement to pursue regime change
The legal architecture is older and stranger than most British coverage acknowledges. The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, Helms-Burton, does not merely permit the United States government to maintain an embargo against Cuba. Under Title II, it requires the executive branch to fund Cuban opposition groups and to plan for a “transition government.” Regime change is not a policy preference of whichever administration happens to be in office. It is a statutory obligation written into US law.
The National Endowment for Democracy has funded Cuban civil society organisations, independent media, and opposition networks continuously since the 1990s. Its Cuba grants are listed publicly on its own website. USAID spent over $300 million on “democracy promotion” in Cuba between 1996 and the mid-2010s, including the ZunZuneo programme, a covert USAID project to build a Cuban social media platform specifically designed to foment political unrest, exposed by the Associated Press in 2014. These are not allegations. They are documented expenditure from US government records.
The honest description of this infrastructure is: an ongoing, congressionally mandated, taxpayer-funded operation to destabilise the government of a neighbouring state. The euphemism “democracy promotion” is doing significant work there, and we should not repeat it.
The isolation that never gets reported
Every year since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly has voted on a resolution calling on the United States to end the embargo. In 2024, the vote was 187 in favour, two against. The two were the United States and Israel.
One hundred and eighty-seven countries. That number does not appear in most coverage of Cuba policy. It should be the first sentence of every such piece, because it tells you everything about where the global consensus actually sits and who is isolated. Washington’s framing, that the Cuban government is the outlier, the rogue, the state that defies international norms, is inverted. On this specific question, two states defy international consensus, and one of them is running the blockade.
What the piece cannot pretend
The Cuban government’s human rights record is real. The 11J protesters who took to the streets in July 2021 were met with mass arrests and sentences running to decades. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented the treatment of dissidents, journalists, and religious minorities in detail. Cubans have genuine economic grievances that the government has not resolved and cannot resolve entirely by reference to the blockade.
Acknowledging this is not a concession to the regime-change argument. The People’s Britain position is direct: none of that record justifies collective economic punishment of an entire population. The blockade does not target the Cuban government. It targets the Cuban people, their ability to import food and medicine, to receive money from relatives abroad, to keep the lights on. Collective punishment is not a human rights policy. It is the alternative to one.
The strongest version of the counter-argument is this: Cuba could improve its human rights record and the blockade would still exist, because the blockade is not a response to human rights violations. It is the continuation of a Cold War project by other means, maintained by the political requirements of the Cuban-American bloc in Florida, institutionalised in Helms-Burton, and periodically tightened or relaxed according to which administration needs what from whom. Biden removed Cuba from the list to get 553 people out of prison. Trump put it back to signal to Rubio’s constituency that the project continues. The Cuban people received nothing from either transaction except the ongoing blockade.
The pretext factory
What Rubio’s Inauguration Day announcement demonstrates is the pretext machine in its purest form. No new Cuban action triggered it. No fresh assessment was published. No evidence was produced. Cuba was relisted because it was politically useful to relist it, and the SST mechanism exists to make that useful.
This is how sixty-three years of blockade works. When Cuba does something Washington can use, the screw tightens. When it needs something from Cuba, prisoners, a deal, a diplomatic moment, the screw is briefly loosened. The Cuban population lives inside the mechanism throughout. The pretext changes; the project does not.
187 countries have voted, year after year, to end it. Washington has not noticed, or has not cared, which amounts to the same thing.