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letter of may to the president Obama

by Open-Publishing - Monday 3 May 2010

Justice Governments USA South/Latin America

May 2nd, 2010

Mister President Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

Washington DC 20500

Mister President,

More than a year after your election, we sincerely thought that we would not be having to write you again to ask you to free the Cuban Five – René González, Ramón Labañino, Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González and Antonio Guerrero, who have been political prisoners in your country for eleven years and eight months now.

Last April 6th, the 2010 CulturAmerica Festival, that takes place every year in Pau, ended. This festival is known worldwide. Pau is a city in the South-West of France, close to Spain. This year, among the six conferences held during the festival was that of Maurice Lemoine, a conference on the Cuban Five. This journalist has written a 1,000-page book that will be coming out next October – “Five Cubans in Miami”. His conference, which was dazzling, was a great success. The Cuban Ambassador and the Bolivian Ambassador were present at this conference.

Little by little, inexorably, truth gains ground, in spite of the United State’s shameless campaign against Cuba, and also that of the European Union, which is following suit. Recently, as far as disinformation is concerned, since the death of the Cuban prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, we have been inundated! Your country is denigrating Cuba in the name of human rights, when it’s been your nation that is constantly flouting these very rights.

Every day that passes brings its share of discoveries concerning the United State’s policies towards Cuba!

All the archives from the sixties have not yet been declassified, far from it! And we have the right to wonder what secrets they contain, when we read the documents that we’ve been able to procure.

In an internal document from the White House and CIA archives one can read that on March 17th 1960, the President of United States Dwight David Eisenhower, in a reunion with high National Security officials, approved the document titled “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime”,”, submitted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The plan mainly consists of four levels of action:

1) The formation of a Cuban exile organization to provide coverage for operations carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

2) To support the propaganda campaign, the creation of a medium wave radio station to transmit to Cuba, probably from Swan Island, located to the south of Cuba.

3) To create an international propaganda offensive on behalf of the opposition and create, in Cuba, a clandestine organization to collect intelligence data and carry out actions, under the orders of the organization leaders in exile.

4) To develop outside of Cuba a small military force and, subsequently, a paramilitary group that would enter the island to organize, train and lead local resistance groups.

These measures, including various diplomatic actions such as the political isolation of the revolutionary government, were considered as more than sufficient to create an intolerable situation for the Cuban government.

At the reunion which approved the document, the U.S. president made it clear that: "our hand should never appear on anything being done". Regarding the Eisenhower command, he made the people attending the signing of the Order swear that nobody had heard anything said there. Afterwards, the then CIA director, Allen W. Dulles, received the president’s order "not to even present the secret reports on Cuba to the Council (National Security)."

One would think that this plan was conceived in 2010, it is so much in line with today’s US policies towards Cuba. You are well-placed, Mister President, to know that this plan has not aged a bit, that today the United States is still doing all it can to destabilize Cuba.

For fifty years your country has been relentlessly pursuing Cuba. We had hopes that, after your election, there would be a change in your relations with Cuba, but hardly anything has changed in this respect! It’s not any better in Europe, and it’s rather ridiculously tragic to see the European Union condemning Cuba for the death of Zapata when one thinks of the prison conditions in the E.U. During the single year of 2009, more than a hundred prisoners have committed suicide in French prisons, and the prison situation has even been denounced by Markus Jaeger, in charge of Human Rights at the European Council!

As far as certain demonstrations are concerned, they were put down with a violence that cannot be compared to the dissidents in Cuba! But here in our country, we can’t complain, we’re in a “democracy”…

United States citizens are saturated with false information on the death of Zapata, which has been thoroughly exploited, but they are wrongly informed, indeed not even informed at all, on the miracles performed by a little country like Cuba, when it brings medical assistance to numerous countries, helping the most destitute populations. What does the United States know of the aid given by Cuban health workers in Haiti and Chili after the catastrophes these countries went through?

The US media has focused more on the death of Zapata than on the crime committed on July 12th 2007 by your soldiers in Iraq, the images of which are being transmitted worldwide on You Tube. It took almost three years for this film of a group of peaceful Iraqis being shot down from a combat helicopter in a Baghdad street to be broadcast. Namir Noor-Eldeen, a photographer from Reuters and his driver Saeed Chmagh were among this group of people; both of them were killed in this attack that caused eleven victims.

Once more, Mister President Obama, we ask you to put your campaign promises in accordance with your actions concerning a change in relations with the Latin American countries, starting with Cuba. To begin these new relations, you will have to liberate the five Cubans; this is inescapable. We are all waiting for you to grant the “executive clemency” that will at last give back to them the liberty that they deserve.

Still hoping, in spite of all, such a gesture on your part that will spark off a true change in relations, hoped for by a large majority of countries, please accept, Mister President, the expression of my most sincere humanitarian sentiments.

Jacqueline Roussie

Translated by bill Peterson

Copies sent to: Mrs. Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Mr. Harry Reid, and the US Ambassador in France.