If Cuba had its own list, America would take top spot.

By DeWayne Wickham

June 16, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "USA Today" - Finally, Cuba is no longer on America's list of state sponsors of terrorism, which in the case of our Caribbean Island neighbor has long been a badly tarnished label.

Before Friday — when the Obama administration formally removed Cuba — four countries were on this list: Cuba, Syria, Iran and Sudan. North Korea, which is arguably the world's most terrifying state, is no longer a member of this club. Neither is Eritrea, a brutal, secretive African dictatorship; nor Libya, a failed state that's a hotbed for Islamic State terrorist recruits and the scene of a recent mass beheading of Ethiopian Christians.

The U.S. first branded Cuba a sponsor of terrorism in 1982 because of its support for leftist rebels in Latin America, a region of the world in which successive American governments had supported a long line of right-wing dictators.

Three years later, when a civil war in Nicaragua pitted the leftist, Cuban-backed Sadinistas against the U.S.-supported Contras, the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran and used a portion of the payment it received to send arms to its side in that conflict — in violation of a federal law.

At the time Iran, too, was on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. But the Reagan administration was concerned more with U.S. dominance over the American hemisphere than enforcing the prohibition against arms sales to countries on that list. It wanted to beat back Cuba's growing influence in the Americas and was far less concerned about the terror Iran might have executed half a world away with the U.S. weapons it got.

In truth, the sponsors of terrorism list maintained by the U.S. State Department always seemed to have been an instrument of American foreign policy — and domestic politics — more than an unbiased effort to punish all countries that support terrorism in one way or another.

Not surprisingly, the latest change in policy toward Cuba has moved some people to complain that the communist nation was taken off the list too soon. They point to Assata Shakur (whose birth name is Joanne Chesimard) as proof that Cuba continues to harbor terrorists. Shakur got a life sentence for her role in a 1973 shootout in which one New Jersey trooper was wounded and another one killed. She escaped in 1979 and made her way to Cuba, where she was granted asylum.

But if Cuba had its own Most Wanted Terrorist list, Luis Posada Carriles would top it.

Posada is widely believed to have been one of the masterminds behind the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner near Barbados that took the lives of 73 people. Though he has a long history of violent attacks, the Cuban exile lives openly in South Florida, where he's widely regarded as a hero for his acts of terrorism, which allegedly include the bombing a Havana hotel that took the life of an Italian tourist.

Posada's partner in crime was a guy named Orlando Bosch. Former attorney general Richard Thornburgh, who served in the first Bush administration, once called Bosch, who died in 2011, "an unreformed terrorist." But that didn't stop President George H.W. Bush from pardoning Bosch to keep him from being deported. In return, Bosch renounced the use of force against Cuba — and then backed away from that promise.

"They purchased the chain," he told The New York Times, "but they don't have the monkey."

Posada and Bosch were alleged terrorists who aided the U.S. effort to maintain hegemony over this hemisphere. In return, they were given safe harbor in this country — which long ago undermined this nation's standing to accuse other nations of being a state sponsor of terrorism.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes weekly for USA TODAY.