Cuban officials on Thursday freed a prominent opposition activist, a last-minute diplomatic change in fortunes for the Biden administration which had sought his release but long seemed unable to influence events on the island.

Jose Daniel Ferrer, the leader of one of the largest banned anti-government groups in Cuba, was released two days after a surprise flurry of diplomatic activity involving the communist-run island in the waning days of the Biden administration.

On Tuesday, State Department officials announced the removal of Cuba from a US list of countries that support terrorism, also saying that Cuban officials had agreed to a Vatican request to free Cubans jailed for anti-government activity among other crimes.

Cuban officials said they would “gradually” free 553 prisoners, although they cautioned that they were not issuing an amnesty and that those being selected for release could be forced to complete their sentences if they didn’t exhibit “good social behavior.”

For more than three years, US officials in particular had called on the Cuban government to release Ferrer, who was convicted of participating in the July 11, 2021 protests, the most wide spread demonstrations to take place on the island since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

“Don’t be afraid to fight for a free, prosperous and just Cuba,” Ferrer said in a telephone interview following his release Thursday with Radio Martí, a US government-funded radio station that Cuban officials have long accused of trying to destabilize the island.

While the fiery comments by Ferrer, whom the Cuban government calls “a mercenary” in the employ of the US, are likely to make officials in Havana grit their teeth, for years their top priority has been to convince US officials to remove them from the list of countries that support terrorism, which incurs devastating economic penalties.

Upon taking office, Biden seemed poised to do that until the 2021 protests that led to more than a thousand Cubans convicted in mass trials for rising up against the government.

Following the protests, State Department officials conditioned any improvement in relations on the release of the protestors while Cuban officials said they had received no concrete guarantees that economic sanctions would actually be lifted and that the US should stay out of the island’s internal affairs.

Even visits by Vatican representatives to the island to press for the release of the protestors were unable to break the deadlock until the final days of the Biden administration.

But even as governments across the region applaud the surprise diplomatic breakthrough this week, it looks unlikely that the incoming Trump administration will build upon the brief thaw in relations.

On Wednesday, Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State and one of the most hardline opponents to Cuba’s government, blasted their removal from the terrorism list and lifting of other sanctions.

“There is zero doubt in my mind that they meet all the qualifications for being a state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio said during his confirmation hearing.

While Rubio said during that hearing that any policy changes would be decided by President Trump, he seemed confident of the incoming administration’s position on Cuba.

“I think people know my feelings and I think they know what the president’s feelings have been about these issues when he was president previously,” he said. “And nothing that the Biden administration has agreed to in the last 12 or 18 hours binds the next administration, which starts on Monday.”

But ramping up pressure on Cuba again after more than 60 years of US economic sanctions was unlikely to force the government to adopt political reforms said Peter Kornbluh, the co-author of “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana.”

“Biden got some results,” he said. “He has reminded the world of the model of diplomacy and backchannel efforts to advance US interests. Trump and Rubio represent a model of coercion: sticks versus Biden’s carrots.”

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parilla said if the incoming Trump administration did place Cuba back on the list of countries that support terrorism, it would prove his government’s point that the list had become political tool rather than a deterrent.

“If another president came and included Cuba on the list again, we would have to ask ourselves what the reasons are, what the agencies of the US government would say, where the credibility of the government would be,” he said.

Just three days before US President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House, Russia and Iran are set to finally sign a “comprehensive partnership agreement,” a deal that’s been in the works for months.

It’s a move that will refocus attention on a partnership that has shaped the battlefield in Ukraine, and which remains committed to challenging the US-led international order – even as the new US administration promises greater engagement with Russia.

Russian and Iran share a complicated past, peppered with conflict, and even now tread a fine line between cooperation and mistrust. And yet, the war in Ukraine has pulled Moscow and Tehran closer.

In July 2022, five months into his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran, his first wartime trip outside the former Soviet sphere.

Behind the photo ops and handshakes, his “special military operation” was not going to plan. His army had lost a lot of its initial gains as it was pushed out of the Kyiv region – and would go on to lose more later that year in two further successful Ukrainian counteroffensives.

Those drones have formed the backbone of Moscow’s attritional war, swarms of them – targeting civilian areas and energy infrastructure in an effort to break the resolve of Ukraine’s people and deplete its air defenses.

Moscow has also, according to the US, taken delivery of Iranian ballistic missiles – and while no evidence of their alleged deployment has surfaced yet, that news alone sent a strong signal to Ukraine’s allies that Putin was willing to escalate.

Less desirably for Moscow, it was also one factor that helped shift the debate around providing Ukraine with permission to fire Western-supplied long-range missiles at military targets in Russia. Several prominent Russian military bloggers claimed in early January, without providing evidence, that Iranian missile launchers and other equipment were being delivered to Russian military training grounds ahead of the deal’s signing.

Two-and-a-half years on from Putin’s Tehran visit, the dynamic has markedly shifted for both sides. Russia now has the advantage in Ukraine. It is gaining territory on the eastern front, and with the help of North Korean soldiers, slowly pushing Ukraine back in the Russian region of Kursk. The incoming Trump administration, to Moscow’s barely concealed glee, wants to start talks, and is making noises about letting Russia keep the territory it occupies, and stalling Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership.

Iran, meanwhile, is feeling decidedly less secure. Nikita Smagin, an independent expert on Russia and Iran, who worked for Russian state media in Tehran before the invasion of Ukraine, says the Pezeshkian administration is rushing to get this treaty signed with Russia amid multiple threats to its security.

“They are frightened by the Trump administration, they are frightened by Israel, they are frightened by the collapse of Assad, the collapse of Hezbollah,” he said, explaining that Iran is looking for a show of support.

Moscow may look to exploit this. The Russians have “a great nose for somebody in trouble,” said Alterman, and may be thinking “we can help them a little bit, but we can get them where we need them and extract more from them that we want.”

What more Russia wants is less clear. It has now indigenized Shahed production on Russian soil – and having paid its dues to Iran under an initial franchise deal to manufacture them, is now doing so with much less direct Iranian involvement.

Russia’s recent battlefield gains have come at a huge cost to its troops – so while its manpower issues are nowhere near the level of Ukraine’s, it could use more boots on the ground. But experts are skeptical Iran would be as amenable in this regard as North Korea, which has deployed around 11,000 of its troops in Russia’s Kursk region, according to Ukrainian and Western assessments.

“Even when Iran is fighting their wars outside Iran, they are not willing… to sacrifice their soldiers,” said Smagin, “and when we’re talking about Iran and Russia there is a very big background of distrust from the Iranian side to Russia.” And Russia may be wary of any mutual defense pact, given the more immediate threat to Iran from Israel.

“I think this is partly intended as a message to the Trump administration that we each have options,” said Alterman. “I think the Iranians are looking for tools they can use with the Americans… and there’s a sense that this gives them something to trade or something to talk about.”

Iran, facing the prospect of a possible revival of UN sanctions that were lifted under its 2015 nuclear deal, is urgently looking for ways to persuade the US to rejoin that deal, which Trump exited in 2018 – or restart negotiations.

For Russia, a new treaty with Iran – a country which might be closer than ever to being capable of producing a nuclear weapon – may be partly about dangling the specter of further escalation before a new US administration that it sees as less committed to Ukraine.

“The Iranians certainly have some worrying capabilities, the Russians certainly have demonstrated a willingness to use worrying capabilities,” Alterman said.

With its manicured garden and spacious interior, the three-story villa was once described as “paradise” by the mother who raised her five children there. And much was done to preserve the household’s tranquility, given its immediate neighbor: the largest and most notorious Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz.

Inside the family home, Rudolf Höss – the longest serving SS commandant of Auschwitz – dreamt up the most efficient way to kill the millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political prisoners that the Third Reich had decided to eliminate.

Tall trees and a high concrete wall obscured the view and the screams of the camp so that Rudolf’s wife Hedwig and their five children – Klaus, Heidetraud, Brigitte, Hans-Jürgen and Annegret – could live shielded from the atrocities committed just feet from their door.

Theirs was a joyful life. The children played with turtles, cats, rode horses and swam in the nearby river. Meanwhile, the concentration camp’s chimneys spewed smoke as other families were pushed into the gas chambers.

Since Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, the house at 88 Legionow Street had been in the private hands of a Polish family. But last year it was acquired by the Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based NGO that has sought to combat extremism since 2014.

Within days, this building – a potent symbol of how the Holocaust was orchestrated and a major character in the Oscar-winning movie “The Zone of Interest” – will open its door to visitors in a brand-new form.

The NGO’s plans for the house are twofold: to give a new center to their organization and to open this long closed-off house to the public in time for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp on January 27.

“When you look at this property, the gardens, the fountains, the normal, ordinary life, we’ve been taught since the time of the Holocaust to never forget,” said Mark Wallace, CEO of the Counter Extremism Project. “Eighty years later it’s clear that while essential, “never forgetting” is not enough to prevent the hate and antisemitism that right now grips our society.”

Now, it isn’t just pictures of the Höss’s blissful domesticity that remain, but also diaries, one written by the family’s housekeeper and the other by Rudolf Höss himself. This was not out of choice: After his capture and before his execution, Höss was ordered to write his memoir, giving an insight into the workings of a mind that was both ordinary and chillingly evil.

In it, Höss described himself as man committed to discipline and dedicated to order. He wrote that it was “to protect the mental health” of his guards that he decided to utilize Zyklon B, an insecticide he used to murder as many Jews as effectively as possible.

During Höss’s three and a half years at the camp, four additional gas chambers were built intended for industrialized annihilation. More than 1.1 million people were murdered there, making Auschwitz-Birkenau the deadliest of all the Nazi camps.

The diary also gave much of the material for 2023’s “The Zone of Interest,” which is almost completely set in the house and its immediate surroundings. The movie highlights the ‘banality of evil,’ a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt, and puts forward the idea that the commandant was just a person, not a monster.

“Human beings did this to other human beings and it’s very convenient for us to try and distance ourselves from them because we think we can never behave this way, but I think we should be less certain than that,” said the movie’s director Jonathan Glazer.

Höss’s diary also helps readers understand more about the family’s life at 88 Legionow Street and the lengths they went to to protect their children. The frosted windows, the high walls, a revved-up motorcycle outside gas chamber number 1 to drown out the cries of the people inside.

In the memoir, Höss also recounts how he watched women and children being taken to the gas chambers.

“A woman approached me and pointed at her four children, who were helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, and whispered, ‘How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful darling children? Have you no heart at all?’”

After witnessing such scenes, Höss wrote, he would ride his horse to clear his mind.

But at no point did he appear to understand the horror of his actions. He called the extermination of the Jews a “mistake” rather than a crime and something that was the result of obeying too blindly orders from above, given, he says, on the basis of a mistaken ideology.

“Let the general public continue to regard me as a bloodthirsty beast, a cruel sadist, as the mass murderer of millions of human beings: for the masses could never imagine the commandant of Auschwitz in any other light,” Höss wrote. “They will never understand that I, too, had a heart.”

Höss went on the run after the liberation of Auschwitz, but was then captured, becoming the first person at such a senior level to admit the extent of the slaughter at the camp. He was made to testify at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and was later condemned to death by a Polish tribunal.

Höss was hanged from the gallows between the camp and his house in 1947.

The surviving Höss family continued to put a distance between themselves and what Rudolf Höss had done. His wife Hedwig and daughter Brigitte moved to the United States following his execution. In an interview in 2013 with the Washington Post, Brigitte said: “It was a long time ago. I didn’t do what was done. I never talk about it – it is something within me. It stays with me.”

“There must have been two sides to him. The one that I knew and then another.”

As to the house, the plan is for it to open to the public in time for the 80th anniversary commemorations. Work to turn part of the property into a museum and the rest into a workspace will take many months, the Counter Extremism Project says.

“Everyone has or can relate to the “house next door.” But today hatred lurks with ubiquity in houses as close to us as next door. House 88 will take up the fight against destructive hatred, and against extremism and antisemitism,” Wallace said.

The first thing members of the Counter Extremism project did was to attach a mezuzah to the front door, as a way of both reclaiming the house and opening it to all.