letter of september to Obama

President Barack H. Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

Washington DC 20500

Mister President,

Last August 13th, nineteen mountain climbers from the Southwest of France scaled the highest summit of our Basque-Bearn Pyrenees, the Auñamendi Mountain (2,504 m).

We were demanding, by this symbolic act, in the name of their many friends in our region, the liberation of five Cubans – René González, Ramón Labañino, Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González and Antonio Guerrero.

I am sending you a photo, with this letter, of our group at the summit.

It has now been twelve long years since these five patriots have been political prisoners in the United States. They are locked up in your jails for having fought against terrorism carried out against Cuba, coming from your territory, and this has been going on for fifty years : three thousand Cubans killed and two thousand disabled since the révolution, it’s no small matter!

Under these circumstances, to see you include Cuba on the list of terrorist countries strongly resembles dishonesty. The fact that you did this just a few hours before the commemoration of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, which you implicitly recognized as monstrous, and at the moment when Cuba is opening up to dialogues is, to say the least, shocking!

As if this were not enough, at the same time, a public assembly of the “Cuban Patriotic Junta” was taking place in total liberty in Miami, during which the arms dealer Osvaldo Mitat, the right-hand man of Santiago Álvarez Fernández-Magriña, who is the main collaborator and accomplice of the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, was elected vice president. Mitat, along with Alvarez, was part of the crew of the Santrina, the shrimp boat that brought this international terrorist into the North American territory in 2005. Both of them refused to testify against this murderer.

Since your election, we are still waiting for a different attitude on the part of the government that you are presiding, even though this hope is fading away as the months pass.

If Cuba gave political asylum to members of the “Basque Faction”, you are well aware that it’s because the Spanish government, under Felipe Gonzales, asked them to.

The Cuban people aspire to peace in order to live, at last, under normal conditions.
How do you expect us to have the slightest confidence in the United States justice system? We just had, once again, another example of how biased it is.

When he should have been preparing his collateral appeal with his lawyers, Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo was thrown into “the hole” in his prison, and not for a disciplinary reason! He stayed there for 13 days, from July 21st to August 2nd in a cramped cell without ventilation during a suffocating heat wave. The pressure put on by his lawyers and his friends from all over the world contributed to putting an end to his torture. As Gerardo said to his wife, on the telephone on August 3rd, after having come out of “the hole”, “We had no
oxygen.”

This was not the first time that he went through a situation such as this. When they were arrested, the Cuban Five stayed for seventeen months in “the hole” in their Miami prison. Almost a year and a half under inhuman and degrading conditions! Moreover, keeping someone locked up for so long in solitary confinement is against the law in the United States. At this time, Mister President, you were not responsible, no more than when they were again sent into “the hole”, in their different prisons, when they should have been preparing their appeals with their lawyers,for one long month in 2003.

These five courageous patriots should not be rotting away in prison any longer.
We are asking you, Mister President, one more time, to be deserving of your Nobel Prize, to sign the “executive clemency” order, or to take any other measures appropriate which would at last give them the liberty that they deserve.

Please receive, Mister President, my most sincere humanitarian sentiments.

Jacqueline Roussie

Copies sent to: Mrs. Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Mr. Harry
Reid, and the ambassador of the United States in France.

Translated by Bill Peterson