Letter of february to Obama.

Mr President Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

Washington DC 20500

Mr President,

It is already the month of February 2012, and the five Cuban patriots, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino, and René González, are still not liberated. You cannot say that René González is free, as your justice system does not allow him to return to his country; in consequence, his life is in danger.

In my last letter to you, I wrote how we are a great number of people who are hoping for an act of humanitarian exchange that would enable Alan Gross to rejoin his family in the United States, and the Cuban Five to go back to their homes in Cuba.
I was extremely shocked when I read an editorial in the Washington Post dated December 31st 2001 –

« …The Castro government sees Mr. Gross as a potential bargaining chip in its campaign to win the return of five Cuban spies from the United States. This effort has unfortunately received support from Hollywood celebrities, Nobelists and even, after a fashion, former president Jimmy Carter, who called for the spies’ release when he visited Havana in March (while saying their fate should be “separate” from that of Mr. Gross).
There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between the illegal espionage of the Cubans and the conduct of Mr. Gross. The five Cubans were sentenced to long prison terms in 2001 for, among other things, operating as undeclared foreign agents and infiltrating U.S. military installations in South Florida. All are acknowledged intelligence officers, unlike Mr. Gross, a would-be humanitarian who got himself caught up in the U.S.-Cuban dispute over U.S. efforts to promote civil society on the island… »

What an incredible lack of ethics on the part of a newspaper journalist to qualify the five Cubans as “spies”, when espionage was never part of the charges brought against them, and to write that “unfortunately” some celebrities regard with favor the possibility of an exchange between Alan Gross and the five Cubans. An honest journalist is supposed to know his subject and to treat it impartially.

There is effectively “no equivalence, moral or otherwise” between Alan Gross and the five Cubans. The last thing I would do is to bring the slightest moral judgment against Alan Gross. It is most likely that he fell into a trap thinking he was going to do a humanitarian act for the Jewish community in Cuba, without knowing the ins and outs of USAID. On the other hand, we know what USAID really is (see attached article); we know that it finances a program for which the goal is to change the government of Cuba. Alan Gross was arrested with a huge assortment of satellite telephones. Cuba, which has been the victim of terrorism for more than fifty years, bans the entrée of such telephones into its territory, seeing as they can be used for organizing terrorist attacks. The Jewish community in Cuba, by the way, specified that they had absolutely no contact with this man, nor did they need his materials.

As for the five Cubans, they never looked to do harm to the United States government; they were just protecting their country by infiltrating terrorist groups in Florida, thwarting their deadly plans. Moreover, the North American public prosecutor’s office recognized from the beginning – “the struggle against terrorism is the defendant’s motivation and motivations should not be revealed to the jury” (official documents, the Prosecution’s Motion in Limit, 2000).

It is true that for this difficult and dangerous mission, the Cuban Five were undercover, and that three of them operated under false identities. They had no choice, most of the North American authorities being accomplices with the terrorists. If we suspected this fact at the time, today the complicity is obvious. After having been arrested, the Cuban Five were illegally held in solitary confinement cells, with no means of communicating, for 17 months, in Miami Detention Center. An impartial judgment for them was refused, Miami being a violent area where law and order have broken down and where in addition, at that moment, what with the “little Elian Gonzalez” affair heating up public opinion, the atmosphere was far from being calm.

And as if that were not enough, the newspaper reporters who covered the trial were being paid by the state government of Florida to fuel this hotbed of hate against Cubans, thereby influencing the jurors.

The defense lawyers had access to very few documents for defending the Cuban Five, most of them having been classed “secret”. Gerardo Hernández was condemned to life for conspiring to assassinate, whereas the prosecution itself recognized that it was impossible to confirm this charge. If the brothers to the rescue organization had ceased flying over Cuban territory and had not ignored numerous warnings, their two small planes would not have been shot down.

The editorial in the Washington Post is fueling the poisonous atmosphere against Cuba, and is doing a lot of harm to the possibility of better relations between your two countries. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case.

One more time, Mr. President, I am asking you to do what should be done in order to, finally, set these five Cuban patriots free, the freedom they have been denied for more than thirteen years.

Jacqueline Roussie

Copies sent to: Mrs. Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Kathryn Ruemmler, Janet Napolitano; to Mr. Harry Reid, Eric Holder, John F. Kerry, Pete Rouse, Rick Scott and Charles Rivkin, United States Ambassador in France.

Translated by William Peterson