Poll Reveals 78% of U.S. Residents Don't Consider Cuba a Threat

Poll Reveals 78% of U.S. Residents Don't Consider Cuba a Threat
Fecha de publicación: 
1 April 2015
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 The Reuters/ Ipsos survey also showed that U.S. residents consider President Obama to be a bigger threat than Cuban Leader Raul Castro. A Reuters/Ipsos released Monday showed that 3 out of every 4 residents in the United States did not consider the Caribbean Island of Cuba to be a threat to U.S. national security.

Only 21.8 percent of respondents saw Cuba as a threat, while a greater percentage of U.S. residents view their own president as a bigger threat to the United States than Cuban President Raul Castro.

An online poll this month asked 2,809 Americans to rate how much of a threat a list of countries, organizations and individuals posed to the United States on a scale of 1 to 5, with one being no threat and 5 being an imminent threat.

The poll showed that only 20.6 percent of respondents viewed Raul Castro as a “serious” or “imminent” threat, while at the same time 28.9 viewed Barack Obama a “serious” or “imminent” threat.

Cuba's close ally, Venezuela, which was recently declared by Obama to be an “extraordinary and usual threat” to the United States, was not included in the poll. Relations between the U.S. and Cuba took a historic turn on Dec. 17, when the U.S.

President admitted that his country’s 50 year policy to topple Cuba’s government had failed and that the two countries would begin negotiations to normalize relations.

Raul Castro and Barack Obama are due to meet next week in Panama at the 7th Summit of the Americas. This will be the first time Cuba will participate at the gathering of regional leaders.

The poll marks a notable change in attitude amongst the U.S. population toward Cuba, which has been villified in the United States since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which broke the decades of tutelage from Washington that the island operated under.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll also revealed that respondents were most concerned about threats related to potential terror attacks. Islamic State militants were rated an imminent threat by 58 percent of respondents, and al Qaeda by 43 percent.

The Ipsos survey, conducted between Mar. 16-24, included 1,083 Democrats and 1,059 Republicans. The data was weighted to reflect the U.S. population and has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points for all adults.

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