letter of april to Obama.

Mr President Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

Washington DC 20500

Mr President,

Gerardo Hernandez, one of the Cuban Five, has been serving a life sentence for more than thirteen years now. He was accused of “conspiracy of attempted murder” for the death, on February 24th 1996, of four pilots of the Hermanos al Rescate (HAR) organization.

This accusation is ridiculous; this Cuban, just as his four compatriots Fernando González, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero and René González, have consecrated the prime of their youth to the struggle against terrorism.

Gerardo Hernández had nothing to do with the dramatic death of these young pilots. This fact is so true that the Prosecution had demanded that this accusation be taken off the case file, admitting that it was impossible to prove. Nevertheless, in record time, the jury declared Gerardo Hernández guilty. It would have been surprising had they proclaimed the contrary what with the deleterious public mood being fuelled in Miami at the time of the hearing, bribing when necessary several newspaper reporters.

The head of the HAR organization, Jose Basulto, had been interviewed by the reporter Calvo Ospina in Miami, in 1997. To the question:

“According to other sources also, the HAR planes violated Cuban airspace at least twenty times and, each time, they launched anti-government propaganda tracts. Is this true?” Basulto responded thusly:

“Affirmative. On August 13th 1995, for example, we flew over Havana. But it was to disrupt Cuban military intervention on several small boats with exiles aboard. On January 9th and 13th 1996 also, taking advantage of good weather conditions and the right altitude, we launched 500,000 tracts that had a simple message…”

How would your government have reacted, Mr. President, if Cuban aviation forces had, several times, violated United States airspace, even flying over your country’s capital? I can imagine that the reprisals would have been immediate and devastating!

Surprised, Calvo Ospina asked Basulto:

“Why hadn’t they already shot your planes down or made them land? Any other country would have done that.”

His response was without ambiguity:

“I don’t know why! I don’t know why they didn’t shoot us down. And almost every time, we launched our tracts over Havana, the same ones that we threw down to the Cuban warships. The message was simple and inoffensive: “compañeros no, hermanos” (not comrades, brothers), to tell them that we weren’t comrades. Others called for civil disobedience… After that, the opposition, the dissidents from Concilio Cubano and the independent reporters, that we supported, called Miami radio stations to say they’d picked up several tracts and were distributing them among bystanders.”

Last February 24th, the Florida conferee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen called on the international police (Interpol), demanding that they arrest the three Cuban pilots who had shot down the HAR planes. This conferee has a lot of nerve – Cuba, the F.B.I. and the F.A.A. (Federal Aviation Administration) warned, on numerous occasions, of the risk the HAR organization was taking in violating Cuban airspace.

Her demand verges on indecency when one is aware of the role played by Ros-Lehtinen in the grace accorded by President George Bush “senior” to Orlando Bosch, one of the brains behind the terrorist attack against a Cubana Airlines passenger plane on October 6th 1976 that caused the death of 73 persons. This woman, during the court case of Luis Posada Carriles, the other brain behind the attack, collected funds to pay the lawyers for this criminal.

Inhumanity, Mr. President, is certainly not on the side of the Cuban Five, but on that of Basulto, Ros-lehtinen and those who support them.

These five Cuban patriots have been suffering every day for more than thirteen years from this monstrous injustice. This deliberate injustice on your part is all the more revolting because neither Gerardo Hernandez, nor René Gonzalez, can receive visits from their wives who are refused systematically an entree visa for the U.S. by your administration.

René Gonzalez has done his time, but he is forced to stay in the United States for three more years. At the end of February, his lawyer asked for a special fifteen-day permission so that René could go to Havana to allow him to be at the bedside of his brother Roberto who is hospitalized in Havana with brain cancer. Even though your government had rejected, on March 12th, this demand, Judge Lenard of the Miami Court, granted it to him on March 19th. We sincerely thank her for this gesture.

Mr. President, how much longer are you going to draw out the ordeal of these five Cubans? The day will come when the United States will be forced to answer to its relentlessness against Cuba.

Hoping in spite of all for a gesture on your part to initiate new relations between your two countries, if only to honor your Nobel Peace Prize, please receive, Mr. President, the expression of my most sincere humanitarian sentiments.

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