Cuba rejects inclusion on U.S. terror blacklist

Cuba rejected Saturday its inclusion on a newly U.S. State Department backlist of "state sponsors of international terrorism." The U.S. government "has absolutely no moral nor any right to judge Cuba, who has an unblemished history in the fight against terrorism and has also been consistently a victim of this scourge," said a statement of the Cuban Foreign Ministry. Cuba accused the U.S. of "political manipulation of such a sensitive issue as the fight against terrorism," adding that "the terrorist actions against Cuba which were organized, financed and perpetrated from the U.S. territory, often with the complicity of the government itself," have killed 3,478 Cubans and injured another 2,099. The statement denounced that "the sole purpose of the U.S. is to discredit Cuba and justify the economic embargo against the island, which has been held for half a century." The Cuban government asked for the end of the U.S. "blockade and hostility" and for "punishment for the real terrorists," referring to the anti-Castro groups based in Miami, and called for the liberation of five Cubans imprisoned in the United States since 1998, who were accused of spying. The annual report of the U.S. State Department released last Thursday placed Cuba on the blacklist of countries sponsoring terrorism, along with Syria, Sudan and Iran. Washington, which has had no diplomatic ties with Havana since 1962, put the Caribbean island nation on its terror blacklist every year since 1982.