Home > Cindy Sheehan’s arrival in Cuba...
Movement South/Latin America Cindy Sheehan
by teresa simon-noble
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The image of Cindy Sheehan’s arrival in Cuba, followed by Medea Benjamin, Tiffany Burns, Adele Welty and Ann Wright, these good, honest Americans who happen to believe in integrity and who happen to get it right, evokes for me so many memories of my own mother, an American woman, tall of stature and of humble heart who lived in Eastern Cuba, the Cuba I left through those very gates of that very Jose Martí International Airport some 49 years ago.
This woman of humble heart and high stature, Cindy Sheehan, who has vowed to pursue an agenda of peace and of holding the Bush administration accountable for their crimes against humanity, and who will not be forced to back down or away from what she believes is right, connects, for me, a universe so much more larger than the one inhabited by George Walker Bush, his parents George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce, and any of his siblings.
It is an infinite universe of right and integrity, of moral correctness, that my mother first taught me about and worked to connect me with. It is the universe of the Jonathan Livingston Seagulls and the Little Princes of St. Exupery’s, "only with the heart does one see rightly."
Sheehan’s universe is the universe of the unpretentious American for whom the one thing that really matters in life is that of doing the right thing. It is a universe which is or has been populated by people like Janet Reno, by the father of Family Therapy Murray Bowen, M.D., by Socrates, Gandhi, Jesus Christ and a few other souls, whose lives have been a guiding beacon for those in search of truth.
Truth: is the very enemy, at every step of their way, of the Bush Family Evil Empire’s quest for power and dominion...and, as the gadfly of truth, Cindy Sheehan, like a modern day Socrates is seen by the Bushes as a mortal enemy to whom they dare do nothing but ignore and then have their minions go out and flame.
Doing the right thing in Sheehan’s mind is stopping the occupation of Iraq by the United States, holding George W. Bush and his administration accountable for their High Crimes and Misdemeanors, and to that end she is willing to go wherever the call takes her to spread her message of opposition to said Occupation of Iraq by George W. Bush, and to holding Bush and his administration for the lies and manipulations that took us there and for those lies and manipulations that have kept us there.
It was from my mother, an American of humble heart living in Cuba, from whom I learned that the value of truth can never be measured in pounds, or in gold, but that there is very little which satisfies the heart as much as a heart that walks in union with truth.
It is an image of my mother’s final departure from Cuba in 1956 through that very airport, which the photo of Cindy Sheehan’s arrival in Cuba brings to mind.
Sheehan’s arrival in that Cuban soil and her projected trip to that Eastern Cuban soil that I left so long ago bring to mind so many memories of growing up in one of the most poetic regions of Cuba, amidst the mountains and the Caribbean, in the meeting place of Heaven and Earth.
It is that I find, that from this far away land, her arrival at the Eastern Coast of Cuba opens up for me the floodgates of memories of that very Eastern Coast of Cuba where I was born and lived with my mother until 1956, when I was 13 years old, when we came to my mother’s Mississippi home, where she spent the last months of her life, and to which I returned after my Mother’s death until March of 1961 when I came back to this land which had, in 1909, given birth to my own mother.
It is that Sheehan’s arrival in Cuba takes me to a much unexpected place I have not visited in 49 years and as such I was touched by the picture of her arrival at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport.
It is that it is good to see the image of the Good Americans, an image endangered or made extinct throughout the world since George W. Bush took office in 2001, shining, spiritedly, in a land which I left so long ago.
Teresa Simon-Noble is a computer activist for peace. She is a former mental health clinician. A poet and a freelance writer. Her work has been published in several online publications.