The Cuban government “categorically” yesterday Friday denied the presence of rebels on the island National Liberation Army (ELN)an organization against which it was later announced that the Colombian military was conducting operations.

The Havana announcement follows the decision of the new US president Donald Trump to reverse, on his first day in the White House, a recent decision by his predecessor Joe Biden to remove Cuba from the US list of states that, according to Washington, support “terrorism”.

“I categorically confirm that no member of the Colombian National Liberation Army (ELN) or its central command is in Cuba”emphasized through X o Euchenio Martineshead of the Latin American and Caribbean Directorate at the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The presence of ELN executives in Havana had pushed the first Trump administration (2017-2021) to put the communist-ruled island on the US blacklistas Washington criticized its refusal to proceed with the extradition of the leaders of the armed group in Colombia, as demanded by the former Colombian president Ivan Duke (2018-2022).

As host of the peace process, Cuba hosted ELN leaders during negotiations between the rebels and the Colombian government. The peace process was halted in 2019 after a deadly rebel attack on a police academy in Bogotá.

The then government had then demanded that Havana proceed to extradition of the members of the rebel delegationwhich Cuba refused to do citing its guarantor status.

The current Colombian president Gustavo Petroin power since August 2022, restarted the peace process with the ELN, the oldest guerrilla movement in Latin America. But the negotiations were suspended in mid-February by Bogota, which accused its fighters of committing “war crimes”.

Immediately after, arrest warrants for the main leaders of the armed organization, which had been suspended in 2022 and 2023, were reactivated.

The head of the Latin American and Caribbean Directorate at the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified that the last presence of ELN negotiators in Havana goes back to February 2024in the context of the sixth cycle of the peace process.

On January 14, a few days before handing over power, the former president Biden he had stated that his government does not have “information to support the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.”

The Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel reported yesterday via X how “among the most perverse maneuvers of the enemies of the Cuban people are the false pretenses they construct to accuse Cuba of criminal practices, which they can never prove.”