LA Times: Political calculus keeps Cuba on U.S. list of terror sponsors (Assata Shakur case)

[flamingdem]

** John Kerry capitulated to the Cuban American congressmen who put their issue over our constitutional rights with the travel issue and who make us the laughing stock of the world for putting Cuba on the state sponsor of terrorism list - shared with only Iran, Syria and Sudan. Hasta cuando will we put up with this Americans? Senator Menendez with his new found power in the Senate Foreign Relations committee is ramming this down our throats with the help of various Reps in congress.

Edit: this article doesn't cite Assata Shakur - but she is the one being used to claim Cuba harbors terrorists. She apparently still lives there.

-- article

Cuba’s communist leadership was quick to send condolences to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings and to reiterate to Washington that it “rejects and condemns unequivocally all acts of terrorism.” Once a key supplier of arms and training to leftist rebels in Latin America, the Castro regime long ago disentangled itself from the Cold War-era confrontations. Havana now hosts peace talks between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that it once supported and the U.S.-allied government the insurgents battled for years.

Havana still gives refuge to a few fugitive radicals from the Black Panthers and Basque insurgents, and two years ago a Cuban court convicted 64-year-old development specialist Alan Gross on spying charges for attempting to install satellite equipment without government permission.

But nothing that Cuba has done suggests its government is plotting harm against Americans, national security experts say. And they criticize as counterproductive the State Department’s decision, disclosed this week, to keep Cuba on its list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” “We ought to reserve that term for nations that actually use the apparatus of statehood to support the targeting of U.S. interests and civilians,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security and now writing and lecturing on national security in the Boston area. “Yes, Cuba does a lot of bad things that we don’t like, but it doesn’t rise to anything on the level of a terrorist threat.”

On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the administration “has no current plans to remove Cuba” from the list to be released later this month. The island nation that has been under a U.S. trade and travel embargo since shortly after revolutionary leader Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 is in the company of only Iran, Syria and Sudan in being branded with the “state sponsor” label.



http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-cuba-us-terror-list-20130502,0,2494970.story

[msongs]

1. political cowardice is more like it. cuba cannot nuke us like russia and china can yet we block it n

[flamingdem]

2. Good point. Raul Castro is making major changes to make friends with the USA

and since there is no financial incentive, or oil involved, the USA continues it's game.

[Mika]

3. The financial incentive is the US political campaign and lobby money.

And for that to flow to BOTH sides, then the status quo rules.

No US embargo = no anti embargo lobbying.
The greatest lovers of the sanctions are those pols who oppose it.
The greatest lovers of "Castro's Cuba" are the anti Castro Cuban exiles who are empowered by them.
THE POWERS OF CONGRESSIONAL CORRUPTION USES MIAMICUBAN EXILES AS COVER FOR THEIR DUPLICITY.

[GeoWilliam750]

4. Might this be a sop to the Fanjuls?