Voices from 16th Annual Cuba Caravan

The following is the press release and audio from Today's Press Conference in McAllen, Texas with the 16th Annual Pastors for Peace Caravan.

Speakers are all members of the Caravan, and can be found in this order in the 4 minute audio...

Reverand Luis Barrios,
Board of Directors, Pastors for Peace, Puerto Rico
Kit, Denmark
Reverand Lucius Walker,
Executive Director Interreligious Foundation for Community Organizing
Nancy Abby, 2nd year Caravanist, Santa Cruz
Reverand Thomas Smith, President of the Board of Pastors for Peace
Reverand Diane Baker, Texas
Reverand Lucius Walker

For more information you can visit the website...
http://www.ifconews.org/

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MEDIA ADVISORY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE JULY 18, 2005
CONTACT: IFCO/Pastors for Peace:
Ellen Bernstein in McAllen, TX: 646/319-5902 (cell)
Lucia Bruno in New York: 212/926-5757 (office)


PASTORS FOR PEACE CARAVAN BACK AT BORDER TO CHALLENGE CUBA BLOCKADE

PRESS CONFERENCE: TUESDAY JULY 19 AT NOON
Mazenod Renewal Center at the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle
Road #1426, San Juan, TX


The 16th US/Cuba Friendshipment Caravan, organized by IFCO/Pastors for Peace, is preparing
to launch a new challenge against the US economic blockade of Cuba. 150 participants – from the US as well as from Mexico, Canada, Uganda, nine European countries, and the Caribbean – are currently gathering in McAllen, Texas. Seven large yellow buses, one small bus, and two box trucks, all of them brightly painted, as well as several other smaller vehicles, all of them filled with valuable humanitarian aid, make up the Pastors for Peace caravan, which has stopped in 130 cities in all parts of the US and will soon be on its way through Mexico to Cuba.

As in previous years, the caravan is carrying nearly 150 tons of humanitarian aid for Cuba – hospital equipment such as incubators, EKG and X-ray machines, dental chairs, medical supplies, computers, school supplies, and urgently needed relief aid for the recent victims of Hurricane Dennis. Once again Pastors for Peace will challenge the immoral and illegal US blockade against Cuba, which has been in place for more than 45 years, by traveling to Cuba to deliver this humanitarian aid without asking for permission or license from the US government.

Five of the yellow school busses donated to Cuba are dedicated to the five Cuban prisoners who are unjustly being held in US federal prisons for defending their country against terrorism.
“It’s outrageous that our government could consider giving asylum to a self-proclaimed convicted terrorist like Luis Posada Carriles, but that these five Cubans – who were working to protect their people from Posada’s deadly attacks – have been locked up for seven years,” said Rev. Lucius Walker, executive director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), parent organization of the project Pastors for Peace.

Posada Carriles was convicted in the 1976 explosion of a Cuban civilian airliner – the worst act of air terrorism in our hemisphere prior to World Trade Center attacks. He was convicted for an assassination plot against Cuban President Fidel Castro in 2001. And while the real terrorists are walking free in the streets of Miami, the Cuban Five are serving long and unjust sentences, some of them even denied their basic human rights of family visitation.

The United States government has tried to isolate Cuba but it is the United States that continues to isolate itself. In defying an unjust policy, Pastors for Peace participants once again will add their voices of condemnation against the U.S. blockade of Cuba when they cross the border on Thursday morning July 21 just after 9:00am. As IFCO board member Rev. Luis Barrios said, “It’s our moral responsibility to take part in this journey for justice.”

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