State: No Current Plans to Remove Cuba From Terrorism List‏

From today's State Department Daily Press Briefing with Spokesperson Victoria Nuland:

QUESTION: There are reports today that Secretary Kerry is in discussions on possibly removing Cuba from the state sponsor terror list. Can you comment on that?

MS. NULAND: I saw that report. Let me say firmly here it is incorrect. This Department has no current plans to remove Cuba from the state sponsor of terrorism list.

QUESTION: And why not?

MS. NULAND: We review this every year, and at the current moment we – when the last review was done in 2012, we didn’t see cause to remove them. We’ll obviously look at it again this year, but as I said, we don’t have any plans at the moment.

QUESTION: Sorry, really quick, can you just give a little bit more of an explanation of what exactly are the – what makes a country – I mean, what are the specifications for a country being on the state sponsor of terror?

MS. NULAND: Well, we’ve talked about this before here. There’s a limit to what I can get into because it takes me into intelligence. But we do – we are required to look at these lists every year and to judge countries individually against the standards in the legislation. And we did that in 2012. We’ll obviously have to do it again in 2013.