If the U.S. wants to put Cuba on a terror list, they might as well add the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders too.

Is it really 2010? It feels more like 1962. After the attempted Christmas Day bomb plot on a plane bound for Detroit from Amsterdam, the Obama Administration added Cubans and travelers from Cuba coming to the United States to the “special scrutiny” protocols reserved for “state sponsors of terrorism.”

What in the world for? Cuba poses zero threat to the United States. But still, Washington gets the jitters. Could it be paranoia left over from the Cold War? Russia pulled its nuclear arms out of Cuba in 1962 before pulling themselves out of Cuba altogether in 1991. Perhaps the Obama Administration hasn’t paid close attention to Cuban history. It might be hard to do when their focus is on maintaining its economic embargo.

Including Cuba on a list of state sponsors of terrorism is ridiculous. Cuba’s foreign relations are grounded on principles of solidarity, cooperation, and partnerships. This has unfolded through business deals, energy consortiums, medical internationalism, and education exchanges with many countries. Not once has Cuba condoned, let alone supported, violent terrorist attacks on the U.S. or any other nation. As The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson put it, “It is not the Al-Cuba network.”

In fact, it is Cuba that has been a victim of terrorism.

In 1976, Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born, Venezuelan, anti-Castro, former CIA operative, was found responsible for exploding Cubana flight 455, killing all 73 people on board. Cuban, Venezuelan and U.S. authorities all concluded that Posada was responsible. Posada remained in Venezuela until 2005 when he requested asylum to the United States, which he was granted. On May 17, 2005, Posada was detained by Homeland Security for extradition to Venezuela, but the move was overruled by an immigration judge who believed that Posada may face torture in Venezuela. He remains free in the U.S.

Then in 1997 Salvadorian Raul Ernesto Cruz exploded a bomb in Havana’s Copacabana hotel, killing Italian-Canadian Fabio di Celmo. Also in 1997, Alpha 66, a Miami-based Cuban exile terrorist group, claimed responsibility for further bombings in Havana at the hotels Nacional, Cohiba, and Capri as well as at the offices of Havanatour based in Nassau. Since 1990, Cuba claims that dozens of terrorist attacks have been attempted against its government.

Despite Cuba being a repeated victim of terrorism, the U.S. still sees the country as a threat. Why?

Due to “its relations with other state sponsors of terrorism” goes the official story from Washington. What do these relations look like? Does Cuba provide weapons to Somalia? No. Does Cuba provide training for Al-Qaeda? No. They do, however, send medical professionals to other countries like Pakistan that are on the list of “state sponsors of terrorism.”

On October 8, 2005, after a devastating earthquake in the Kashmir region killed 79,000 people, left over three million homeless, and impacted a total of eight million people, Cuba had a team of close to 2,000 medical professionals on the ground. Pakistan and Cuba had cool political relations at best before this tragedy. Those doctors, nurses, paramedics, and technicians set up field hospitals in remote parts of the country, treating over 1.1 million people in total.

The Cuban doctors offered not just emergency medicine, but also primary care to the poor, many of whom had never seen a doctor in their lives. Victims who required prosthetic limbs and advanced treatment were flown back to Cuba to receive care at no charge. The Cuban team left after 13 months, and when they did, they offered 1,000 medical scholarships to Pakistani youth so that the next time an earthquake hit, there would hopefully be more Pakistani doctors ready to help.

If this sort of humanitarian behaviour is sponsoring terror, then why not include members of the Red Cross? That humanitarian organization has been offering much needed medical care to the Sudanese, another country on the terror list. And the Red Cross has been long present in the Middle East, offering care to victims of war and violence even in Yemen! Surely this sort of assistance should place every single Red Cross volunteer on a special scrutiny list. And what about Médicins Sans Frontiérs? Forget the fact that they received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, they’ve been helping in the Sudan since 1979.

Of course suggesting that the Red Cross and MSF be placed on a scrutiny list is lunacy, and if the Obama Administration or any other administration tried it, the public outcry would be enormous. How could a government deem humanitarianism to be the sponsorship of terrorism? We would not tolerate it. Yet Cuba gets landed on the list for its long-standing effort to help others.

President Obama seems to want progressive relationships with Cuba, and Cubans very much want progressive relationships with the U.S., but the machinery of Homeland Security and the State Department is not helping the cause. Obama said at the 2009 Organization of American States meeting that he had heard much about Cuba’s medical internationalism and that it was a reminder to the U.S. that foreign policy can involve much more than military interventions. Hopefully the president remembers his remarks and removes Cuba from the state sponsor terrorist list. And hopefully in the process the technocrats at Homeland Security get a much-needed crash course in the history and politics of Cuba.