letter of april to Obama.

Mr President Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

Washington DC 20500

Mr President,

Last March 5th, your fellow countryman Peter Schey, a lawyer and the President of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law at Los Angeles, wrote you a long letter asking for the liberation and the return to their country of the five Cubans, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino and René González. In this letter, he insisted particularly on the case of Gerardo Hernández, and asked if you would be so kind as to declassify the documents concerning the tragedy of the two small planes belonging to the “Brothers to the Rescue”, shot down February 24th under orders from the Cuban government.

Gerardo Hernández has been serving, for fourteen years now, a life sentence for “conspiracy to commit murder” for this “Brothers” airplanes affair, without the least proof of his guilt having been established. The Prosecution even demanded that his case-file be removed from this charge, admitting that it was impossible to prove.
This lamentable tragedy never should have happened, and the young pilots would still be alive if the “Brothers” organization had respected the numerous warnings that the FAA (the Federal Aviation Administration) had given concerning the risks the “Brothers” were taking in violating Cuban airspace so many times.

The very least of justices that one could grant Gerardo Hernández would be, effectively, to find out if the Cuban government was within its rights in shooting down these two small planes, no matter what one’s opinion of this act. The Cuban radar systems indicated that they were flying over Cuban territorial waters, whereas the United States government affirms that they were in international airspace.

This object of contention could be clarified as Peter Schey demanded, and as Gerardo’s lawyers demanded many a time, by consulting the satellite photos that your government possesses. This, by the way, is what U.S. Colonel George E. Buchner, who was presented as the Prosecution’s expert on the subject, had also recommended. Unfortunately, the United States has continuously refused to release these photos, and has trusted the testimony of Bjorn Johansen, the coxswain of the ship “Majesty of the Seas”, who was a witness for the Prosecution, to locate the exact spot that these planes went down. This localization is not reliable, firstly because it is founded on human observation and, secondly, because one can only be skeptical of the objectivity of this witness, when one knows that Bjorn Johansen was working at the time for the shipping company “Caribbean Cruises”. In fact, this company was giving financial support to the CANF (Cuban-American National Foundation), besides which Bjorn Johansen’s second in command on the ship was Peter G. Whelpton, a member of the CANF.

You know very well, Mister President that the obsession of the CANF is to overthrow the government of Cuba.

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

“According to other sources also, the Brothers 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!

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.” Basulto responded:

“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...”

Mister President, is your government finally going to authorize the court to use these satellite photos as the President of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law in Los Angeles, in his turn, demanded?

For how much longer is the five Cuban patriots Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino, and René González, going to far away from their loved ones? For how much longer is your country going to continue to refuse an entrée visa to the United States, to the wives of Gerardo Hernandez and René Gonzalez?

Just as you take all measures to protect the United States from terrorist attacks, so did the Cuban government send agents in the “Avispa” network, which the Cuban Five were part of, to infiltrate the terrorist underground in Florida, to protect their island.

Justice has got to be rendered to these five courageous patriots.
Please receive, Mr President, the expression of my most sincere humanitarian 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.