President Barack Obama told Congress on Tuesday that he plans to remove Cuba from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, removing a major obstacle to restoring diplomatic relations and reopening embassies.<\/p>\n
Obama’s decision follows a summit in Panama where Obama and Cuban President Fidel Castro sat down on Saturday for the first meeting of its kind between US and Cuban leaders in nearly 60 years.<\/p>\n
Cuba’s communist government had demanded removal from the US blacklist to move forward on efforts to normalize relations between the two former Cold War foes. Obama ordered a review of Cuba’s presence on the list after he and Castro announced a diplomatic breakthrough on Dec 17.<\/p>\n
Obama’s decision was submitted to Congress for a further 45-day review, but lawmakers are extremely unlikely to block the move.<\/p>\n
There had been some expectations that Obama would announce his intention to remove the terrorism designation and move forward on restoring diplomatic relations at the summit.<\/p>\n
Washington placed Cuba on the list in 1982, citing then-President Fidel Castro’s training and arming of communist rebels in Africa and Latin America. But Cuba’s presence on the list has been questioned in recent years.<\/p>\n
Source: Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Barack Obama told Congress on Tuesday that he plans to remove Cuba from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, removing a major obstacle to restoring diplomatic relations and reopening embassies. Obama’s decision follows a summit in Panama where Obama and Cuban President Fidel Castro sat down on Saturday for the first meeting … Continue reading “Obama says Cuba no longer terrorists”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[365,844,1237,1638],"class_list":["post-18489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-angola","tag-cuba","tag-terrorists","tag-us"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18489"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18490,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18489\/revisions\/18490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}