Press Release
Changes Will Likely Lead to Less Suffering, Decreased Migration to the US
Washington, DC — The Biden administration’s decision to remove Cuba from the State Department’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” (SSOT) list, to suspend Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, and to ease other sanctions on Cuba is welcome news, experts at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) said today. The reversed measures, imposed largely during the second half of Trump’s first administration and maintained, until now, by the Biden administration, triggered additional layers of economic and financial sanctions on top of the preexisting, decades-old US embargo against Cuba. If these changes are maintained under the next administration it will help to alleviate Cuba’s current economic and humanitarian crisis and thus reduce out-migration from the island to the US and other destinations.
“Experts agree that the sanctions the first Trump administration imposed on Cuba as part of a ‘total pressure’ strategy, in particular the SSOT designation, contributed to the country’s economic collapse and to a large increase in the number of people leaving Cuba for other countries — primarily the US,” CEPR Director of International Policy Alex Main said. “Unfortunately, this unjustified and counterproductive Cuba policy — driven by notorious neoconservatives like former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former national security advisor John Bolton and current Trump Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio — was left in place by the Biden administration, until now.”
Data show that Cuba has lost 10 percent of its population in just the last few years. The waves of Cuban out-migration to the US and other countries followed a move in the final days of the first Trump administration four years ago by then secretary of state Mike Pompeo with the support of the likes of Mauricio Claver-Carone, now Trump’s nominee for special envoy for Latin America, and Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s current nominee for secretary of state. Pompeo had, without justification, sidestepped the US State Department’s counterterrorism bureau in arriving at the decision to make the designation and had offered no evidence of Cuba’s supposed support for terrorism.
It is unclear whether Trump will reverse the waiver of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act. Trump notably renewed the waiver several times during the first years of his administration. It was only in 2019 that Pompeo announced the decision not to renew the Title III suspension, about a year after the arrival of John Bolton, a neoconservative hardliner, as National Security Advisor. Title III enables naturalized Cubans and other US citizens to sue persons or entities profiting off property expropriated decades ago by the Cuban government; its enforcement has had a major dampening effect on foreign investment in Cuba.
“If Republicans want to address the root causes of immigration, they should support this decision to ease sanctions on Cuba,” CEPR Senior Research and Outreach Associate Michael Galant said. “Research shows that economic sanctions, like those the US has imposed on Cuba for decades, mostly harm the populations of the targeted countries, and some of these people will invariably leave their countries in the hopes of going somewhere where they can survive and perhaps lead a dignified life.”
“While this decision, which comes years after 80 members of Congress urged Biden to reverse Trump’s ‘total pressure’ approach should have been made long ago, it is better late than never,” Main said. “Sixty years of failed policy should be more than enough, and hopefully the new administration will have the wisdom and the courage to pursue a new course, one that’s in the best interest of both the US and the Cuban people.”
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