With the request to remove Cuba from the list of sponsors of terrorism, a group of Cuban-Americans representing various organizations in the United States delivered a letter addressed to President Joe Biden on Monday.
The letter also requested the president to lift the sanctions that weigh on the Cuban family, which have made life more difficult for the people in the Caribbean nation, subjected for more than six decades to a strict economic, commercial and financial blockade that has been maintained. Democratic and Republican governments over time.
Resume nonimmigrant visa processing at the US Embassy in Havana; further relaxing travel restrictions to facilitate exchanges between peoples and family reunification, as well as urging Biden to return to a path of normalization of relations, add to the exhortation.
The Alliance for Commitment and Respect of Cuba (ACERE), promoter of the initiative, said that more than 200 Cuban Americans who support President Biden and 30 organizations, along with concerned US citizens and civil society groups, were the ones who signed the letter.
According to surveys, the path of rapprochement enjoys broad support among a large majority of Cuban-American Democrats in Florida and an overwhelming majority of US citizens, ACERE stressed in a statement.
Signatories include former federal, state and local officials; academics and university administrators; business owners, executives and investors; lawyers; architects; doctors; scientists; educators; artists, musicians and filmmakers; administrators; social workers; veterans and other notable people.
The members of the group participated in a meeting with State Department officials “in which we expressed our disappointment and disgust with the Biden administration’s policies of economic asphyxiation towards the people of Cuba,” said activist Carlos Lazo on his social networks.
“The meeting, which lasted about two hours, took place in an atmosphere of respect and different topics were addressed in relation to the policy towards Cuba and the way in which it is punishing and suffocating the Cuban people,” stressed the resident professor at the city of Seattle, who leads the Bridges of Love movement.
This initiative joins other similar pushes that try to attract the attention of Biden, who during his electoral campaign in 2020 promised – and thus won the vote of many Cuban Americans – to change the failed policies of his predecessor in office, the Republican Donald Trump.
Trump reinserted Cuba into Washington’s unilateral list of state sponsors of terrorism on January 12, 2021, the last of his actions days before leaving office at the end of a mandate that was characterized by maximum pressure and the strengthening of the blockade. with 243 additional coercive measures against the island.
However, Biden still does not fulfill his promise. Almost four years after his victory at the polls and after assuming the reins of the Oval Office, he has not deviated from that line.
