Guantanamo Bay - comparison protest action
G | 29.01.2007 14:17
The Damas de Blanco, or Ladies in White, who march silently through the streets of Havana every Sunday in protest at the incarceration of political prisoners of the Castro regime, wrote a letter to Ms. Sheehan inviting her to visit Cuban prisons.
The Damas drew Ms. Sheehan's attention to the poor state of Cuban prisons, which they say lack clean drinking water and adequate food and where their relatives are imprisoned solely for speaking out against Fidel Castro's government.
The leader of Ms. Sheehan's trip, Medea Benjamin, said the American activists had not seen the letter and that they would be focusing solely on Guantanamo.
"It just so happens that this is where the [ Guantanamo] prisoners are," Ms. Benjamin said. That the group is visiting Cuba, where prisons define daily life for many, is "very incidental," she added.
The Sheehan trip has angered some who believe she should also address Cuba's imprisonment of political dissidents during her visit, not just those held in the American military prison.
"The fact that there's so many Cubans in prison simply for expressing their political beliefs — nobody seems to pay attention to that," the director of government relations at the anti-Castro Cuban-American National Foundation, Camila Ruiz Gallardo, said.
Hollywood liberals and others on the loony left lionize Fidel Castro in an amazing feat of hypocrisy. Sheehan's dismissal of the Castro regime's brutality, which reflects true human rights violations, is par for the course.
G