WASHINGTON -- The White House announced Tuesday that President Barack Obama intends to remove Cuba from the U.S. government's list of nations that sponsor terrorism, eliminating a major obstacle to the restoration of diplomatic relations after decades of hostilities.
The decision to remove Cuba from the list represents a crucial step in Obama's effort to turn the page on a Cold War-era dispute.
It came after a much-anticipated meeting Saturday between Obama and President Raul Castro of Cuba on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas meeting in Panama City, the first such formal session between the leaders of the two countries in more than half a century.
Since 1982, Cuba has been on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation shared only by Iran, Sudan and Syria. Obama ordered a review of Cuba's status in December as he and Castro agreed to move toward normal relations.
White House officials said Tuesday that Obama had approved a recommendation by Secretary of State John Kerry to take Cuba off the terrorism list after the review and assurances from Havana that it would not support terrorism in the future.
The State Department determined that Cuba had not engaged in terrorist activity in the past six months -- a criterion for designating a country as a state sponsor of terrorism -- and therefore no longer belonged on the list.
Obama's action gives Congress 45 days to respond.
Cuba's top diplomat for U.S. affairs hailed the action Tuesday.
"The Cuban government recognizes the president of the United States' just decision to take Cuba off a list in which it should never have been included," Josefina Vidal said Tuesday night. "As the Cuban government has said on many occasions, Cuba rejects and condemns all acts of terrorism, in every form, as well as any action aimed at encouraging, supporting, financing or concealing terrorism."
Washington's isolation of Cuba, particularly its embargo of the island, has been a perennial source of hostility in Latin America, uniting governments across the region regardless of their ideologies.
Even some of Washington's close allies in the Americas have rallied to Cuba's side, sometimes making it hard to gain traction on other, unrelated issues, administration officials have said.
Cuba was attending the Summit of the Americas for the first time since the gathering's inception in 1994.
The meeting created the first publicly planned encounter of the American and Cuban presidents since 1958, though Obama and Castro shook hands in greeting at Nelson Mandela's funeral in South Africa in December 2013 and President Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro shook hands and chatted briefly at a United Nations meeting in 2000.
Obama and Raul Castro pledged to work toward agreement on issues such as human rights and press freedom, and pledged to open embassies in Havana and Washington that have officially been closed since the early '60s. Obama also said he'd push Congress to end a trade embargo against Cuba that has been in place for more than 50 years.
'A hot potato'
The issue of the terrorism list has helped delay the opening of the U.S. and Cuban embassies, which have been closed since 1961.
The U.S. had sought to keep the terrorism designation question separate from the question of restoring diplomatic relations, focusing its demands on ensuring that diplomats could travel freely in Cuba and that Cubans would not be bothered by the police as they entered the re-designated embassy.
But Cuban officials have said they would find it difficult to move forward with diplomatic relations while remaining on the terror list, which they see as a blemish to their nation's image. It has blocked Cuba from doing business with U.S. banks and led some international institutions to shy away from opportunities to work with Cuba.
Not even Cuba's interests section in Washington, the diplomatic outpost that performs some functions of an embassy, could get a bank account because financial institutions worried about violating sanctions from the Treasury Department over doing business with a state on the terrorism list and running afoul of the trade embargo.
Analysts had said Cuba's designation had more to do with politics than any terrorist activity, and critics had attacked the country's inclusion on the list.
The terrorism designation "is a hot potato that is literally too hot for the banks involved to do the business," said Antonio Martinez II, a New York lawyer whose practice includes the regulations regarding Cuban assets.
"The banks involved in or contemplating doing business with Cuba have an enormous compliance burden that does not justify the costs," he added.
"That is why no bank wanted" to have accounts with Cuban diplomats in the United States, complicating efforts to reopen an embassy.
When Obama announced in December that he would seek normal ties with Cuba, he expressed doubt that the nation still belonged on the terror-sponsor list.
Last week, Obama said on NPR that the criterion for removing a country from the list is a "straightforward" evaluation of whether a country is a state sponsor of terrorism, "not do we agree with them on everything, not whether they engage in repressive or authoritarian activities in their own country."
Cuba landed on the terror list in 1982 for its support of leftist insurgents in Latin America. It has remained on the list since then because, according to a State Department report in 2013, the most recent available, it has provided a "safe haven" for Basque separatists and Colombian rebels.
The Cuban government has also harbored an unspecified number of fugitives wanted in the United States, including Joanne Chesimard, who is on the FBI's list of Most Wanted Terrorists for killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1973 and received asylum in Cuba after escaping from prison in 1979.
The FBI said Chesimard, who now goes by the name Assata Shakur, espoused revolution and terrorism against the United States.
Cuban-American Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., last week called the expected move to remove Cuba from the list "another significant misstep in a misguided policy" and cited Chesimard's case among his examples of Cuba's terrorism record.
Still, as the State Department report noted, several of the Basque separatists have been repatriated to Spain, and Cuba has played host to peace talks between the Colombian government and a major rebel group, known by its Spanish acronym FARC.
Fidel Castro in a speech in 1992 said Cuba no longer was supporting insurgents abroad.
"There was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training to terrorist groups," the 2013 report said.
Congressional critics
State Department officials said they had embarked on a thorough review to ensure that their decision to remove Cuba from the list could stand up to any questioning in the Republican-controlled Congress.
Cuba will not come off the list until after a 45-day review period, during which a joint resolution to block its removal could be considered in the House and Senate.
The idea of removing Cuba from the list has been met with considerable resistance from several Republicans and Cuban-American lawmakers.
Even before any announcement had been made, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., who has vowed to block any step toward normalizing ties, issued a statement saying Cuba's expected removal from the list "would be nothing short of a miscarriage of justice borne out of political motivations not rooted in reality."
She said Obama's administration was "so desperate to open up an embassy in Havana at any cost that it is willing to concede to Castro's demand," adding that the action would "further embolden the regime and undermine U.S. national security."
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination whose parents moved to the U.S. from Cuba, criticized the move in a videotaped statement Tuesday.
"The decision made by the White House today is a terrible one," Rubio said. Cuba "should have remained on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and I think it sends a chilling message to our enemies abroad that this White House is no longer serious about calling terrorism by its proper name."
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, another contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, said Tuesday that easing travel restrictions and currency flows will "prop up the Castro regime" with little in return.
"A lot of people are really saddened by this because we're not a step closer to freedom in Cuba because of the actions the president is taking," Bush said.
But leaders in Latin America, where Obama's meeting with Castro was widely celebrated last week, welcomed the move.
"Congratulations to the governments of the United States and Cuba for the important step they took today on the road to constructing a united Americas," Panama's President Juan Carlos Varela said in a Twitter post.
Varela's country hosted the Summit of the Americas.
"We salute this new step that brings the people of Cuba and U.S. closer," Peruvian President Ollanta Humala said in a Twitter post. "Today Latin America holds great expectations for this process."
Information for this article was contributed by Randal C. Archibold and Julie Hirschfeld Davis of The New York Times and by Toluse Olorunnipa, Nicole Gaouette, Bill Faries, Hugh Son and Mark Niquette of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 04/15/2015