Five courageous Venezuelans are spending the Christmas holidays trapped in the Argentine Embassy in Caracas. Magalli Meda, Pedro Urruchurtu, Humberto Villalobos, Claudia Macero and Omar González are prisoners of the military dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro. But make no mistake: Havana is behind this sadism.

This matters because while the “embassy five” are barely surviving, Cuba’s American surrogates in Congress and other parts of official Washington are putting a full-court press on President Biden, trying to get him to lift the U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism before leaving office. For geopolitical, moral and humanitarian reasons, empowering Cuba in this moment would be a tragic mistake.

Cuban-dictatorship insiders live well on the island and there’s still plenty of money to build luxury hotels, pay the armed forces to keep the lid on dissent, and share intelligence to support the Caracas despot. But the 66-year-old regime has destroyed Cuba’s economy. The electricity grid has collapsed. Tens of billions of dollars in loans have been squandered, and most countries will no longer lend to the deadbeat regime. So it wants access to international financial institutions like the World Bank and credit from U.S. banks to secure its power at home and continue its adventures abroad. This requires lifting the terrorism designation.