To  all our American progressive friends:

We are writing this note to you from Cuba with a heartfelt desire to let you know about the formation of the Cuba Committee, which presently  manages the campaign for a better treatment and a possible pardon for Ana Belen Montes

She is an American citizen who was able to sense a different future between our country of Cuba and the United States. A future where both nations would procure to conduct with  each other within the parameters of a relationship based on friendship. Ana Belen was able to foresee a change of the United States government policy toward Cuba that “would bring our government back in harmony with the compassion and generosity of the American people. It would allow Cubans and Americans to learn from and share with each other. It would enable Cuba to drop its defensive measures and experiment more easily with changes. And it would permit the two neighbors to work together and with other nations to promote tolerance and cooperation“, as we are slowly learning to do since December 17, 2014.

However, and in spite of these changes, Ana Belen Montes  continues to be in isolation at the Fort Worth facility in Texas where she has thus served 14 years from her original 25-year sentence, even though her original sentencing was supposed to allow her to have the right of supervised communication. As we see more progress in the United States and Cuba bilateral relations, the isolation imposed on Ana Belen Montes’  prison conditions becomes more and more obsolete and  draconian.

In obedience to her conscience, Ana Belen broke US law and she has undergone boldly and stoically the painful consequences of her actions defending Cuba from attacks. Yet, by the nature of her covert work she prevented  the triumph of extremist political ideas purporting a supposed “danger posed by Cuba to the US national security”, and essentially she was the American woman who, at the risk of her own life, helped to save many of your own young compatriots who  would had died in vain in our Cuban beaches, if the political extremists were allowed to be successful in exciting a confrontation, driven by uncompromising propaganda and an error similar to the faults of Intelligence that brought up the hostilities in Iraq.  Since a foolish and unnecessary war would have separated us forever, you may consider that the progress that has been made between our two countries since December 17th, 2014, would have never had a chance to become a reality without the vision and selfless sacrifice of Ana Belen Montes.

She is an American progressive interpreter of the soul of America, the great nation that emerged as a Revolution against the monarchy and British imperialism, as it has been  proclaimed in the first declaration of the Rights of Man and in the drafting of the first U.S. Constitution. Many Americans with her convictions have died to abolish slavery and fighting fascism. When it was necessary to stand for peace, people like Ana Belen Montes resisted the Vietnam war, where wounded American lads and Vietnamese children lost life and limbs unnecessarily.  She, as many others in the US, opposed the abuse and intolerance of the nineteenth century, and the belligerent concepts of the military-industrial complex of the XX-XXI century. People like her are today heirs to great figures of American history, such as John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Levi Coffin, Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., Lucius Walker and many others, to name only a few.

In the nineteenth century, while Cuba was fighting for its independence, more than 300 American volunteers came to fight against Spanish colonialism with our Cuban “Mambi” army. This is why  a century later, Cuba has named the doctors brigade offered to the Unites States during the hurricane Katrina, “Henry Reeve”, in honor of this heroic American internationalist. Cuban doctors are ready to serve wherever they are called to serve, in remembrance of his example. We honor those who are willing to forsake their own lives as many of those idealists have previously done.  Acts like these shall always be a catalyst for joining, rather than separating us. The pacifist and daring Ana Belen Montes has joined us in this struggle for a better world, and continues to unite us even more. She needs us today. Let us fight the good fight for her, a fight which is  bound to succeed first in the improvement of more fair living conditions in prison, and later in a possible pardon by the US government to our latest American “Mambisa”.

Cuban Committee for Humane Treatment for Ana Belen Montes

for background info, please see:

http://10.16.86.131/the-forgotten-lady-who-gave-her-life-for-cuba/

http://10.16.86.131/does-anybody-know-who-ana-belen-montes-is/