A Parting Number from Trump

This was the last full week of President Trump’s term, and the final days of a lame duck president’s term usually tend to be uneventful. This is not the case with Trump due to the frenzied push to impeach Trump before President Elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20. We do expect Trump to issue some more pardons before Jan. 20, and Trump has also done something else that people, particularly Biden, will remember him for.
On Monday, the Trump administration placed Cuba back on the list of countries considered as state sponsors of terrorism by the U.S. State Department. Cuba joins Iran, considered by most nations as the leading sponsor of terrorism, Syria and North Korea on this list. The Trump administration’s action rescinds a 2015 move by the Obama administration that took Cuba off the state sponsor of terrorism list in order to thaw ties with communist Cuba, a one time Cold War enemy.
According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, this move was warranted because Cuba provided “safe harbor to terrorists.” Pompeo also cited several U.S. fugitives and Cuba refusing to extradite 10 members of the National Liberation Army tied to a bombing in Bogotá, Colombia in 2019 that killed 22 people. There are other reasons why the U.S. might not want to normalize relations with Cuba. The people of Cuba are very repressed by their government, which anybody who fled Cuba to come to the U.S. would attest to. Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel was handpicked by Raúl Castro, and is essentially a Castro clone. Fidel Castro ruled Cuba with an iron fist for decades and Raúl Castro was not much better.
As the Obama administration tried to normalize relations with Cuba, we can likely expect Biden to try to do the same thing. We wonder why the Trump administration did not take this step earlier, but the timing of the Trump administration’s move on Cuba is easy to figure out. Trump knows Biden will, for better or worse, try to normalize relations with Cuba and he wanted to make this more difficult for the incoming president.
–Kernersville News Editorial