Expert Q&A: A Look at Biden’s Last-Minute Cuba Deal

By Ryan C. Berg

Ryan C. Berg is director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is also an adjunct professor at the Catholic University of America and a course coordinator at the United States Foreign Service Institute.

EXPERT INTERVIEW — In one of several eleventh-hour moves, President Joe Biden on Tuesday notified Congress of his intent to remove Cuba from a list of state sponsors of terrorism. Biden also eased some financial restrictions on Cuba and suspended a provision in a law that allows Cuban Americans to seek compensation for property confiscated during the Fidel Castro regime.

In exchange, the Cuban government agreed to “gradually” release some 533 political prisoners and others the U.S. has deemed unjustly detained. Cuba reportedly started releasing prisoners on Wednesday after the deal was announced. The Catholic Church reportedly helped broker the agreement.

It’s a major move involving a nation that has been effectively blacklisted by the U.S. for more than six decades. The U.S. trade embargo imposed on Cuba after Castro seized power in a revolution in 1959 is still in place, but the lifting of the terrorism designation still represents a significant change.  

And that change may be short-lived; it’s unclear if Biden’s Cuba deal will last much past Monday, when Donald Trump returns to the White House. Trump took a hard line against Cuba in his first term as president; he reversed moves by President Barack Obama to thaw relations with Cuba, and it was Trump who put Cuba on the state sponsors of terrorism list in 2020, over accusations that Cuba was harboring Colombian terrorists and American fugitives.

The Cipher Brief turned to Ryan C. Berg, Director of The Americas program at The Center for Strategic and International Studies, to discuss the move and what it means for Cuba policy. “I think there are various elements of this that are just bad policy,” Berg said. “There are reasons for keeping Cuba on the state sponsor of terror list, but there are also reasons to question what the Biden administration has gotten in return for this removal of the state sponsor of terror label.”

Berg spoke with Cipher Brief Writer Ethan Masucol. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can also watch the full discussion on The Cipher Brief’s YouTube channel.

Masucol: What was your first reaction to the deal?

Berg: I think that we’ve heard murmurings for a long time about the Biden administration changing the posture of the United States towards Cuba. We haven’t really seen many moves in that direction, and this is finally a move in that direction. But I think it’s come too little, too late to actually have any policy impact. And I suspect that this policy will be reversed pretty quickly into the Trump administration. In fact, incoming national security advisor Mike Waltz has said that this is going to be likely reversed once they get into office.

I also think there are various elements of this that are just bad policy. There are reasons for keeping Cuba on the state sponsor of terror list, but there are also reasons to question what the Biden administration has gotten in return for this removal of the state sponsor of terror label.

Masucol: One Biden administration official said, “There is no credible evidence…of ongoing support by Cuba to support international terrorism.” Is that accurate?

Berg: That’s a very controversial point. And it’s not exactly as clear cut as the administration official would like it to be. The Cubans have nurtured, throughout their history, many revolutionary movements that the United States considers to be terrorist organizations — within Cuba, and [Cuba has] also financed and funded them abroad. A perfect example is the National Liberation Army or the ELN in Colombia. There’s a reason that Gustavo Petro, the current President of Colombia, is negotiating now with that group through intermediaries in Cuba. Why are they negotiating in Cuba? Because for a long time Cuba was the greatest patron of the ELN. That’s just one example of a guerrilla group that Cuba has spawned, funded throughout their years.

Cuba is a revolutionary regime. It sees it as its responsibility to fund and support other ideological movements that share some of its principles and tenants. So I would argue that part of Cuba’s revolutionary ideology is supporting these types of groups wherever they spring up. That in itself makes Cuba an occasional state sponsor of terror, using public resources, state resources, to support some of these groups wherever they pop up in the hemisphere.


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Masucol: The other aspect of this deal is the easing of some financial restrictions. What impact do those have?

Berg: There are some banking restrictions that come along with being on the state sponsor of terrorism list (SST). There are some ways in which U.S. development assistance can’t be deployed when you have an SST designation.

The other part of this deal is that the Biden administration has decided through executive action to suspend an element of a piece of legislation called the Helms-Burton Act, which was passed in the 1990s. It allowed Cubans, Cuban-Americans and Americans who had property expropriated under the [Fidel] Castro regime in Cuba to be able to sue in in courts in U.S. courts for some kind of reparation on that expropriation. The specific title that is involved here is Title Three. What the Biden administration has done is suspended those lawsuits under Title Three, which means that any of the families that owned companies that were expropriated, or critical pieces of infrastructure expropriated, those cases have essentially been frozen. It’s my understanding those are not moving forward now.

Masucol: In exchange, there’s the release of those political prisoners and those that the U.S. thinks are unjustly detained. What is your reaction to that part of the deal?

Berg: I think we should always celebrate when unjustly detained persons in highly authoritarian countries like Cuba are released. I do, however, have a problem with the way in which the dropping of the SST designation has been linked to the release of political prisoners. The political prisoners shouldn’t have been taken in the first place. And part of being a state sponsor of terror, one of the things that you do repeatedly is you take prisoners or hostages in order to negotiate with other governments. That’s part and parcel of getting yourself on this list. And so I do worry that we’ve incentivized the taking of more prisoners in order to get off lists, in order to get certain designations dropped, certain restrictions dropped.

The other thing is that the Cuban government has said that this will be a very slow release of the prisoners. It’s not a release en masse. And so what the Biden administration has done is effectively tied the hands of the Trump administration when they come in, lest they be responsible for not getting the full prisoner release from Cuba. So if the Trump administration decides early in the administration to reverse this policy, they stand at risk of being accused of not following through on a policy that could have gotten more than 500 unjustly detained people released. I fear that it ties the hands of the incoming administration on Cuba, strictly because they wouldn’t want to be responsible for 500 people not getting the release that they had been promised as a part of this deal.


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Masucol: So that is a dilemma for the incoming Trump administration, especially since members of the Trump team have already said they want to reverse the deal. What do you think the incoming Trump administration is actually going to do?

Berg: I think the incoming Trump administration is going to focus heavily on the Americas. They’ve said as much. They’ve also put in key personnel positions, the secretary of state, the deputy secretary of state, the national security advisor, people who understand the Western hemisphere very well, and people who have been noted hawks on countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua. So, I think that this policy is going to be reversed very quickly in the Trump administration.

And you may see a reversal as well of other policies on sanctions, on certain elements of the embargo, on the restrictions that were in place in the first Trump administration on the level of remittances that Cubans, say, in Florida, could send to their family still residing on the island, mostly out of concern that the military takes a cut of all of those remittance payments. Those are the types of things that I would anticipate us seeing again. In other words, going back to a posture and a set of policies that looks pretty similar to what Trump 1.0 policy looked like on Cuba.

The last thing I would say is that there’s probably even more incentive to go to that kind of policy because what we’ve seen in the last couple days is yet another intelligence agency within the intelligence community of the United States come to the conclusion that Havana syndrome is real, and that there was some kind of weapon that was used against U.S. diplomats, or experimented on US diplomats, in ways that will get further negative coverage, further negative attention on Cuba from the incoming administration.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.  Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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