In a last-minute move before he leaves office next week, President Joe Biden removed Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, lifted sanctions on companies run by Cuba’s military and again suspended a provision in a law that allows Cuban Americans to seek compensation for confiscated property on the island.

The three measures announced Tuesday were described as “unilateral” actions taken by President Biden as a “gesture of good will” to facilitate a deal mediated by the Catholic Church that would lead to the release of Cuban political prisoners, including people who took part in the island-wide July 11, 2021, demonstrations, a senior administration official told reporters.

In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, the Cuban Foreign Ministry said Cuba’s leader told Pope Francis in a letter earlier this month of the decision to release 553 people convicted of “several crimes that are punishable by law.”

The U.S. senior official said Biden notified Congress on Tuesday that the State Department was removing Cuba from the terrorism-sponsor list. The White House was also “rescinding” a 2017 Trump-era memorandum that was the backbone of a policy to impose sanctions on the Cuban military and its multiheaded conglomerate, GAESA, that controls much of the island’s economy, including tourism.

“The principal impact of this rescission is that it would eliminate the so-called restricted list,” the official said without explaining that the list, currently hosted by the State Department, includes companies and several hotels controlled by GAESA. The Miami Herald recently reported that Gaviota, GAESA’s leading tourism operator, has been sitting on $4.3 billion even as the country’s humanitarian situation deteriorated.

The official said that President Biden is also suspending Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, a provision that allows Americans to sue a company if it is benefiting from property confiscated by the Cuban government without compensation. Each U.S. president has suspended the provision since the law was signed by Bill Clinton in 1996 until the suspension was lifted by President Donald Trump in 2019.

“It is our understanding that the Catholic Church has significantly advanced an agreement with Cuba to undertake a set of actions that will allow for the humanitarian release of a significant number of political prisoners in Cuba and those who have been detained unjustly,” the official said.

The Cuban government has engaged “directly in dialogue” with the Catholic Church, the official said, but did not explain if the U.S. has participated in the exchanges. He also did not say how many prisoners were expected to be released. A second administration official said the prisoners were expected to be released “very soon.”

In its statement, the Cuban Foreign Ministry said the 553 people would be released “gradually.”

“The releases are carried out on the basis of a careful analysis based on the different modalities contemplated by the legislation, and as part of the fair and humanitarian nature of Cuba’s penal and penitentiary systems,” the statement said. The ministry did not say if the people to be released are political prisoners, a label the government rejects. The ministry said in the statement that the government routinely grants pardons to people imprisoned, but those are usually given to people who have committed ordinary, not political, crimes.

The officials declined to say if the release of the prisoners was contingent on Cuba’s removal from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism.

“Today’s actions demonstrate that President Biden’s Cuban policy, which is focused on achieving practical results with respect to human rights in Cuba, will pay dividends for the Cuban people,” he said.

But Tuesday’s measures are likely to be short-lived: The incoming Trump administration is packed with Cuba hardliners, including the likely next secretary of state, Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, who was personally involved in shaping some of the policies that were undone Tuesday — in particular the sanctions against the Cuban military.

Rubio, who is facing a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, was not available for comment, his office said.

In a post on X thanking “all who contributed” to removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel said the decision “was right although late and with limited scope. The embargo and most of the extreme measures that were put into effect since 2017 to suffocate the Cuban economy and cause shortages for our people remain in place.”

He did not mention the release of political prisoners. A second Cuban Foreign Affairs Ministry statement about Cuba’s removal from the U.S. list did not mention the prisoners either, and noted that the upcoming administration could “reverse” the decision.

John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, said Tuesday’s announcements are unlikely to change U.S. companies’ reluctance to engage with Cuba, still under a commercial and financial embargo.

“United States companies will not make any changes to their operational cadence relating to Cuba because they know the fragility of the United States-Cuba relationship,” he said.

But activists on the left, who have long aligned with Cuba’s criticism of U.S. sanctions, praised the administration for the measures.

“Removing the state sponsor of terror designation on Cuba is a welcome if long overdue move to avoid deepening the humanitarian crisis on the island,” said María José Espinosa, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. “Decades of bad Cuba policy are the poster child for what is wrong with the overuse of sanctions: the regime endures, ordinary people suffer and the United States’ reputation is tarnished around the world. The designation was little more than a cruel act of political theater.”

Shock in Congress

Members of Congress from Miami were taken aback by the announcements, whose details they learned along with the media.

In a video, Miami Republican representatives María Elvira Salazar, Mario Díaz-Balart and Carlos Giménez used words like “disaster” and “shameful” to describe the new measures.

“The Biden-Harris administration, in an affront to the national security interests of the United States, and while lying to Congress and the American people, have given everything possible to the Castro regime so that it can continue to be in power,” said Díaz-Balart.

Salazar said the measures would provide more “oxygen to the Cuban regime to continue repressing more people.”

In May, Salazar, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee for the Western Hemisphere, asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken if the department was carrying out a review of Cuba’s designation as a sponsor of terrorism during a congressional hearing. He said there were no short-term plans to do so.

On Tuesday, she said Blinken, who “promised me, told me repeatedly that he was not thinking about taking Cuba off the list of terrorist countries ... called my office and said that Biden, directly from the White House, had directed to take Cuba off the list.”

“I thought it was not going to happen, but it did a week before President Trump is sworn into the White House,” she said. “But you know, Trump can reverse that the following week, so maybe the Cubans will have a very short party.”

Florida Democrats, who have experienced a hemorrhage of Cuban-American voters in recent elections, quickly broke with the party line and also condemned the decision.

“I am disappointed at the Biden Administration’s plan to remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism,” said Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried. “While any return of political prisoners from the clutches of Communist Cuba is cause for celebration, the regime’s treatment of the Cuban people continues to be one of the biggest human rights violations of the last century. It would be naive to think that this negotiated exchange would signal a change in treatment for the Cuban people.

“Generations of Cuban-Americans in Florida have told stories about the cruelty of the Castro regime — currently led by Raul’s hand-picked successor — and the dangers they faced in escaping to freedom in America,” she added. “We condemn in the strongest terms Cuba’s removal from this list, as well as any possible lifting of economic sanctions, and call on the Biden Administration to reverse course immediately.”

Cuba was included on the list of nations that sponsor terrorism in one of the last policy decisions made by the Trump administration in 2020, citing Cuba’s harboring of Colombian terrorists and Americans fleeing justice.

The Cuban government has claimed that the inclusion on the list has made it harder to access the international banking system and has contributed to the deterioration of the economic situation on the island. Havana had been actively wielding a campaign to get removed from the blacklist, enlisting regional presidents like Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and former Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to lobby President Joe Biden on their behalf.

Other former left-leaning presidents from the Americas and Spain, former U.S. diplomats and advisers to former President Barack Obama, and Democratic lawmakers who favor engagement with the Cuban government urged Biden to remove Cuba from the list to alleviate the humanitarian situation of the population and curb migration, which has reached historic proportions.

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