Raul Castro Offers to Free Prisoners if US Does (The Havana Note)

Raul Castro Offers to Free Prisoners if US Does

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Raul Castro has responded from Brazil to Barack Obama's call for release of prisoners by urging the US do the same:

"Let's do gesture for gesture," Castro told reporters during a visit to the Brazilian capital Brasilia.
"These prisoners you talk about -- they want us to let them go? They should tell us tomorrow. We'll send them with their families and everything. Give us back our five heroes. That is a gesture on both parts," he said, referring to five convicted Cuban spies in U.S. prison.

Coincidentally, I wrote Presidents Castro and Bush on December 10th urging both grant pardons.

In the generous spirit of the Christmas season and the ending of the year, please consider granting pardons to the five Cubans imprisoned in the US and the fifty-five Cubans imprisoned in Cuba as agents of hostile foreign powers.
I am not proposing your actions be characterized as reciprocal or seeking to compare or judge the merits of the arrest, trial and imprisonment of either group. Suffice to say both situations are surrounded by politics in both nations. One country’s hero is the other country’s villain, and vice versa.

However, the prisoners and their families have suffered enough from the unresolved political conflict between our countries. Rather than waiting for their cases to be addressed as part of a bilateral normalization process in the future, I urge you to courageously remove this problem from the agenda of negotiation.

Castro's words are obviously directed at the next administration but wouldn't it be historic if such an important humanitarian breakthrough were accomplished by this one?

The deliberately provocative undiplomatic behavior by Chief of the Interests Section Jim Cason, conceivably at the behest of Otto Reich and Roger Noriega, provided the perfect excuse if not the reason for the 2003 "black spring" arrests in Cuba.

It would only be decent for the Bush Administration to clear the books by taking steps that will lead to the freedom of those remaining in prison in Cuba at no real cost to the US.

Keeping the five Cuban spies/heroes in our prisons accomplishes nothing except to provide an increasingly effective international propaganda theme for Havana.

--John McAuliff

Posted by John McAuliff on December 18, 2008 4:13 PM | Permalink

Raul Castro Offers to Free Prisoners if US Does

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