The question has changed, so too has the answer:

Strings can’t be tested using math.isnan as this expects a float argument. In your countries list, you have floats and strings.

In your case the following should suffice:

cleanedList = [x for x in countries if str(x) != 'nan']

Old answer

In your countries list, the literal 'nan' is a string not the Python float nan which is equivalent to:

float('NaN')

In your case the following should suffice:

cleanedList = [x for x in countries if x != 'nan']