letter of december to the President Obama

Mr President Obama

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.

Washington DC 20500 (USA)

Mr President,

This year is coming to an end without having seen the liberation of the four Cubans Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and Ramón Labañino, still imprisoned in your country.

We were extremely disturbed last November 8th when Jorge Mas Santos, the chairman of the CANF (Cuban American National Foundation) received you at his residence in Miami, in the presence of his friends and of two Cuban dissidents. While talking to Jorge Mas Santos, you declared, speaking of Cuba:

“I think that partly because we’re of the same generation, we recognize that the aims are always going to be the same. And what we have to do is to continually find new mechanisms and new tools to speak out on behalf of the issues that we care so deeply about.”, then, speaking to everyone, you said: “I think we all understand that, ultimately, freedom in Cuba will come because of extraordinary activists and the incredible courage of folks like we see here today.».

Jorge Mas Santos is a businessman who made a fortune in the telecommunications industry. He is a terrorist and a mobster.

Jorge Mas Santos presides over a terrorist organization. Jorge Mas Santos inherited the presidency of the CANF from his father, Jorge Mas Canosa, the founder of this organization, who died in 1997. In 1985, Mas Canosa organized the escape of the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles from the Venezuelan high security prison where he was locked up for having been the brains behind the “Barbades terrorist attack”. This attack blew a Cubana de Aviacion plane out of the sky, causing the death of 73 passengers and crew members. Posada Carriles is a friend of those who were present at your side on November 8th, described by you as “extraordinary activists”.

One of the ex-leaders of the CANF, José Antonio Llama, alias “Toñin”, hit the headlines in 2006 when he revealed, in the pages of the June 22nd issue of the El Nuevo Herald newspaper, how he created in 1992, within the CAFN, a paramilitary unit destined to plan terrorist attacks against Cuba. This man had taken out a loan from the International Financial Bank, which enabled him to advance the tidy sum of $1,471,840.35 to the CAFN in order to pay the expenses needed for these terrorist attacks. Thusly, this paramilitary group was able to buy a helicopter, seven speedboats, explosives and ten remote controlled model planes to be used for blowing up Cuban economic targets or for an assassination attempt on President Fidel Castro.

You support terrorists, Mr. President! Your predecessor, George W. Bush, drummed out loudly, over and over again, on August 26th 2003, that “he who harbors a terrorist, he who supports a terrorist […] is as guilty as the terrorist”.

Jorge Mas Santos is also a gangster. In April of 1996, barely a month after José Maria Aznar had acceded to the Spanish presidency, Juan Villalonga, the second last president of the state-owned company Telefonica, who was a close friend of Aznar, sacrificed at a cut-rate price, the prosperous filial Sintel de Telefónica in favor of MasTec, the property of Jorge Mas Canosa.

Aznar was therefore probably thanking Mas Canosa for the support he gave him during the presidential campaign. After the death of their father, the brothers Juan Carlos and Jorge Mas Santos fraudulently passed over the Sintel stocks to several financial groups based in tax havens, who then sold them off.

The liquidation of Sintel in 2001 left several thousand workers, totally helpless and confused, without a job, causing a number of tragedies among them.

The Madrid judge Santiago Pedraz alleged that the two Mas Santos brothers, who were the most responsible for the Miami MasTec firm, had “embezzled large amounts of money” from the Spanish Sintec firm “in favor of the Mas family”. The State Anti-corruption Prosecutor’s Office demanded a sentence of 5 years and 6 months for the Mas Santos brothers. The two brothers will never see a prison, they will never even be judged. After having dragged their feet for 12 years, the Sintel affair was closed in June 2013; in return the Mas Santos’s paid a compensation of €35,000 to the 3,000 ex-Sintel employees who were the worst off.

Mister President, Jorge Mas Santos contributed largely to finance your two presidential campaigns. Was not the compensation for this financing the retention in prison of the five Cuban patriots Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino, and René González? How can you explain otherwise this bitter relentlessness against these men, when you know perfectly well that they are innocent? Please, give us a few words to reassure us, after your remarks on November 8th in the residence of this terrorist mobster. Your relations with Cuba must not be subject to the pleasure of “extraordinary activists” of the moral fibre of those who were at your side in Miami on that day.

The former US attorney general Ramsey Clark said : « You can ignore the evil that has been done with this arbitrary decision. Evil detained these people today. The harm to their families and bad relations between the United States and Cuba. Some day in the United States will have to account for this misjudgmen »

Don’t you think that the time has come to normalize, on sound and respectful bases, your relations with Cuba, for the world of good it will do for your two countries?

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 and to Mr. Joe Biden, John F. Kerry, Rand Beers, Harry Reid, Eric Holder, Denis MacDonough, Pete Rouse, Rick Scott, ad Charles Rivkin, United States Ambassador in France.