Cuba Not Off Hook, Despite Removal From US Terror List

New post on Cuba Confidential

Cuba Not Off Hook, Despite Removal From US Terror List by Chris Simmons

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Pamela Dockins, Voice of America

STATE DEPARTMENT— The United States has dropped Cuba from its State Sponsor of Terrorism list but the removal does not clear Havana of all U.S. embargoes and statutory restrictions. The State Department announced Friday that Cuba had been removed from the blacklist – a designation that it shared with Iran, Syria and Sudan.

In an April statement, Secretary of State John Kerry said “circumstances have changed since 1982,” when Cuba was put on the list because of its “efforts to promote armed revolution by forces in Latin America.”

But Cuba still faces U.S. restrictions on transactions such as exports and foreign trade because of other punitive measures that remain in place.

“In addition to the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, there is a web of restrictions and sanctions that have been applied over the years and some of them are unrelated to the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation,” said State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke.

Among them, is the Helms-Burton Act, which includes an embargo and other financial restrictions.  

Mixed Views on significance of Cuba’s removal

Cuba’s removal from the list is largely symbolic, said William LeoGrande, a Latin American politics professor at American University.   “It is more symbolic than it is practical in the sense that most of the sanctions that fall upon a country that is on the terrorism list already apply to Cuba because of the broader embargo,” he said.   But he said the removal was very important to Cuba, as Washington and Havana work to normalize relations.

Feature continues here: Cuba Off State Sponsor List

The MININT Archive (1980)

Jorge Luis Garcia Vázquez author of the blog STASI-MININT, is a Cuban exile living in Berlin. In his blog he provides lots of information about the relationship between the STASI & the MINIT. In his article “El Archivo del MININT y el asesoramiento de la STASI.” (The MININT Archive and the advise of the STASI), he provide the followings statistics (translation):
Until 1980 the MININT had prepared a total of:
2,088,571 records or documents of the State Security
6,056,847 records pertaining to Internal Order
This total quantity of documents: 8,145,418, was the main problem of the Minint, their classification, organization and conservation, especially of 160,000 pre-1959 records....
The Stasi report describes the exact location of the Archive, the status of the personal Card Index, which contains “all the Counterintelligence materials, for example the data on informants, operations carried out or documents of operational importance.”
In this card index alone were registered 4 million people with the following personal data: surname, first name, date of birth, gender, skin color, codified fingerprints and registration number....
The officers of the Stasi, who have came to have 180 kilometers of records and documents on their citizens, delivered gladly to their allies and students in political repression their experiences and technical resources, to monitor and liquidate any opposition or dissent.
Here you can read the whole document in Spanish: Stasi-Minint Connection

 http://www.debatepolitics.com/latin-america/162002-cuba-s-bloggers-sharp-abroad-home-3.html