letter of february to obama

Mr President Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

Washington DC 20500

Mr President,

Last December 28th, the Day of the Innocents, a mischievous Spanish writer announced that your wife was on a private voyage to Cuba with your two daughters. We would be ever so happy, Mr. President, that such a piece of news was true, that your country finally had continuing cordial relations with your close neighbor!

Instead of that, while you are on the brink of a financial catastrophe, you are wasting a fortune trying to destabilize the Cuban regime. Nevertheless, Cuba is holding out its hand to you, and is proposing a humanitarian exchange between the five Cubans Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino and René González, and your fellow citizen Alan Gross; this exchange would make possible new relations between your two countries.

You lay “a return of democracy in Cuba” down as a preliminary condition for any discussions. Since when has the United States cared about democracy in the Latin American countries? The U.S.’s only concern since dozens of years has been to support, in these countries, their giant companies, weather they’re sugar producers, fruit producers, grain producers, oil companies, or others. As soon as a country wants to regain the control of its resources, the United States flies to those giant companies’ assistance in fomenting the overthrow of the government, even if it means replacing these democratically elected governments, chosen by their people, with bloody military dictatorships.

The United State’s intentions towards Cuba had been very clearly expressed in 1960, by the Undersecretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Lestor D. Mallory, who advocated in a memorandum:

“(…) A measure that could have a major impact would be to deny all funding or sending to Cuba, which would reduce the monetary income and real wages, and bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government (…)”

This seems to be the continuation of your line of action, despite the fact that almost every single member country of the U.N. voted against the blockade.

Besides this economical isolation of Cuba, known terrorists, encouraged by the CIA and the different governments of the United States have tortured, murdered, sabotaged, multiplied terrorist attacks and dealt a blow to the Cuban economy.

The job of the five Cubans was to infiltrate the Florida terrorist underworld, so as to avert the numerous terrorist attacks against infrastructures of the tourist industry on the island. By these attacks, your country wished to deal a devastating blow to Cuba in ruining its tourist industry, at the moment when the Eastern Block countries brought an end to their economic exchanges with this little island.

Alan Gross’s mission to Cuba was another matter altogether. He was an USAID subcontractor, an agency of your government, that is working for the famous “return to democracy in Cuba”, that is to say to bring an end to a government that displeases Washington.

The immense majority of the population, both in the United States and in Cuba, aspires to a normalization of your bilateral relations. Such normalization can only commence by the liberation of the Cuban Five, and that of Alan Gross. A humanitarian exchange like this doesn’t appear to be an impossible mission; a previous one took place during your first mandate as president, with Russia!
We truly wish, Mr. President, that your new mandate will be that of a return to the values worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize that was, a little hastily, attributed to you, based on the hope that you brought with you.

Please receive, Mr. President, the expression of my most sincere humanistic sentiments.

Jacqueline Roussie

Translated by William Peterson.

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