letter of september to Obama

Mr President Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

Washington DC 20500

Mr President,

I had just sent you the “August letter” when I found out that your State Department had put Cuba on the “States Sponsoring International Terrorism” list.
In France, every schoolchild learns Jean de La Fontaine’s legend “The Wolf and the Lamb”. In this legend, the wolf accuses the lamb of all the evils in the world, and then kills the innocent animal. The cynicism of your government is comparable to that of the wolf. In fact, it is your government, Mr. President that holds, for generations, the all-time record of terrorism for the entire world.

Every month since your election, I have written you in the name of “The Friends From Monein” of the five Cubans, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino and René González, to demand their liberation.

The Cuban Five have been severely condemned for having fought against United States terrorism threatening their country. This governmental terrorism has killed 3,478 Cubans and has left 2,099 disabled for life.

The blockade against Cuba, despite the willingness of most of the countries in the world to put a stop to it, is also a form of terrorism.

On June 3rd 1993, one of your fellow countrymen, Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous pediatrician, coming back from Cuba, concluded in an article in the New York Times, thusly – “…How should we feel about an embargo that is keeping food and medicines from Cuban children? I feel ashamed.”

In 2011, Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, the Cuban Foreign Affairs Minster, dedicated his vote against the blockade at the U.N., to Guillermo Domínguez Díaz (16 years old), Ivis Palacio Terry (18 years old), Randy Barroso Torres (17 years old) and Adrián Izquierdo Cabrera (12 years old). These children, after having undergone reconstructive surgery, were left bedridden for months because of the lack of extendable prosthesis, the patent being American. He also dedicated his vote to María Amelia Alonso Valdés (2 years old), Damián Hernández Valdés (4 years old) and Dayán Romayena Lorente (12 years old), who are suffering from tumors in their nervous system that require treatments using Temodal, which is also fabricated in the U.S. under an American patent.

Last August 2nd, we learned that the bones found in June at San Fernando in Argentina, in a barrel of cement, had been identified. They were what were left of the Cuban Galañena Hernández, a state employee at the Cuban Embassy. In August of 1976, under the military dictatorship, this man and his colleague, Jesús Cejas Arias, also Cuban, had disappeared. Shortly after they vanished, the Associated Press received a letter in which these two young Cubans (26 and 22 years old) explained that they had “deserted the embassy in order to be free in the Western world”.

The reality is altogether different. These two men had been illegally confined at the underground center of Operation Condor in Buenos Aires, fronted as Automotores Orletti, then were tortured and brutally murdered. Michael Townley, a CIA agent working for the DINA, General Pinochet’s political police force, and your fellow countryman, Guillermo Novo Sampol, a native of Cuba and a member of the sinister CORU organization created by Orlando Bosch, traveled specially, one from Chili and the other from the United States, to carry out a brutal interrogation of these young Cubans. Unfortunately, we know what happened after. This was in 1976, the apogee of the Condor Operation, and these two young men were victims among so many others of this diabolic CIA invention.

Two months after the assassination of the two Cuban state employees, a “Cubana de aviación” airplane then became the target of a terrorist bombing cooked up by Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, causing 73 deaths.

Bosch passed away a year ago in Miami as a free citizen and Posada Carriles is having an easy life under the Florida sun with his friends Michael Townsley and Novo Sampel. As for the Cuban Five, they are still not liberated. Four of them have not yet been freed, and the fifth, René González is on supervised probation in the United States.

The purpose of supervised probation is to assist former prisoners to reintegrate themselves socially. René González is in danger in the United States, all social life is not possible for him, nevertheless, your administration has just refused his request to return to Cuba...and also just refused once again to grant a visa to his wife who can thus not visit him!

Gerardo Hernández, condemned for life, has just filed a motion in a new Habeas Corpus appeal on the basis of all the irregularities of the trial process. Will his appeal be heard by that very judge who condemned him to such a sentence?
Condor still glides along!

We had hoped, Mr. President, after your election, to see you turn the page once and for all on this shameful epoch, and to begin having new relations with your close neighbor Cuba. You have a golden opportunity with the possibility of a humanitarian reciprocity action that would permit Alan Gross to return to the United States, and the Cuban Five to go back to Cuba. It is not too late for such an action that would honor your Nobel Peace Prize.

While waiting for such a gesture, please receive, Mr. President, the expression of my most humanitarian sentiments.

Jacqueline Roussie

Translated by William Peterson

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, Donald, Rick Scott, and to Charles Rivkin, United States Ambassador in France.