With signs that asked to “remove Cuba from the list,” Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the group, burst in front of the cameras, when the Republican representatives María Elvira Salazar and Mario Díaz Balart participated in a meeting with journalists outside the federal Capitol, in this capital.

The lawmakers expressed their opposition to a recent trip to Cuba by members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Salazar and her colleagues insist on keeping Cuba on the arbitrary list, although there is no credible evidence that Cuba sponsors terrorism.

In a video posted on X by Belly of the Beast, the Florida representative assures that Cuba is “a snake that will bite you whenever you get closer and would inject poison in your veins to kill you.”

Ilham Omar, one of the Democratic congresswomen who recently traveled to Cuba, expressed frustration on February 29 over the continuity of Donald Trump-era policies on Cuba and called on President Joe Biden to change.

“For 65 long years the Cuban people have suffered from the embargo (blockade) of the United States,” the representative from Minnesota before the Lower House said, according to a video posted on the same social network.

Cuba is in an unjustified designation as a state sponsor of terrorism that creates new difficulties for the Cuban people, she said when rejecting the impact of this measure.

She noted that the unanimous feeling of everyone she met with when she was in Cuba was their opposition to remaining on that arbitrary list, on which the country was included in 2021, a few days before Trump and his secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, left office.

“Trump and Pompeo created that designation that has no merit and was a political trap for the (Joe) Biden administration,” the congresswoman said.

I call on President Biden to finally get out of that trap and stop this cruel and counterproductive policy, added Omar, who suggested to the president that “he should eliminate the designation of sponsor of terrorism” given to Cuba.

“Like many Americans, I am deeply frustrated by the continued Trump-era policies on Cuba,” she warned.

Persistent calls for a change in policy on Cuba have come to Biden from all directions; however, with another election in the United States approaching, the president has not fulfilled that commitment with which he seduced many Democratic voters in 2020.

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