Academicians call US policy against Cuba hypocritical

Washington, Jan 12.- Attempts to place Cuba on the list of states promoting terrorism is hypocritical and marks the US double standard on the issue, academicians uphold.

 

According to an article published by Reese Erlich, assistant professor of International Studies at the University of San Francisco, on the original antiwar.com site, the State Department’s ‘terrorist list’ includes countries that are not terrorists and excludes those who really are.

Erlich quotes linguist and activist Noam Chomsky, who denounced the hypocrisy of the list and stressed that ‘either they remove it, or they make it honest’ in reference to the manipulations to bring Cuba back into that category.

The maneuver is part of a bigger effort to prevent the Biden Administration from restoring normal relations with Cuba, the academic said.

In reality, he stressed, the Cuban state was never a sponsor of terrorism and never supported the intentional attacks on civilians practiced by groups like Al Qaeda.

He noted that Paul Pillar, former deputy chief of the CIA’s Anti-Terrorism Center, told him that keeping the island in that section was a reward for Florida’s conservative Republicans, thus showing it is clearly a political issue.

For his part, Chomsky points out that in the case of Cuba ‘terrorism means resistance to the massive terrorism of the United States and the refusal to bow down to Washington.

One of the survey’s authors, Guillermo Grenier, a sociology professor at the university, told the newspaper that restoring remittances and travel may be Biden’s key approach to resuming Obama-era relations. (Prensa Latina)