November letter to Obama

Mr President Obama
November 1st,  2013
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.
Washington DC 20500 (USA)

Mr President,

Here we are in November of 2013, and the four Cubans, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and Ramón Labañino, have still not been set free.

I often wonder what the real reasons were for their being arrested on September 12th 1998. FBI agents had already uncovered the Avispa Network agents since 1996, but held off arresting them as they were infiltrating the Florida Mafia underground and were furnishing precious information to the FBI.

It was during Bill Clinton’s presidency that they were arrested by Hector Pesquera. At that time, Bill Clinton was caught up in the “Monica Lewinski” affair, and the arrests of the members of Avispo sparked off a worldwide media show. I remember, in France, that every TV channel discussed “the arrest of the Cuban spies” all day long. Was it that the attention of the United States and the world had to be diverted from this “Monica-gate”?

When the Cuban agents discovered, in 1998, that terrorist attacks were being planned against airlines serving Cuba, the Cuban authorities alerted the United States government. Curiously, Hector Pesquera, a Porto Rican, arrived in Miami a month later. He was a CIA agent very close to the Cuban-American Mafia underground in Florida. In June 1998, Cuban authorities handed over to an FBI delegation that had come to Havana, all the documents needed to arrest the terrorists.

In Miami, Hector Pesquera was elbowing his way in to be chosen as the head of the South Florida FBI. He achieved his ends in September of 1998 and, ten days later, he had the Cubans arrested.

Hector Pesquera would remain as the head of the FBI until 2003. While he was putting all his energy into dealing with the Cubans, he closed his eyes to the suspicious activities of the fourteen members of Al Qaeda, who were taking flying lessons at the Opa-Locka airport, just a stone’s throw from his office. Nevertheless, these student pilots, very mediocre according to their teachers, accomplished wonders on September 11th 2001. They even brought down the WTC Tower 7 – without even touching it! But, this is another story, and Sibel Deniz Edmonds, a translator, would tell you more about it if she hadn’t been forced into silence. All this happened under your predecessor George W. Bush.

Let’s go back to Hector Pesquera. The assassination of President Fidel Castro was supposed to have taken place in 1997 during the Iberia-American Summit on the Venezuelan island of Margarita. This assassination attempt failed because José Antonio Llama’s yacht, which was transporting the commandos and the materials destined for the assassination had been seized by the Coast Guard while they were heading towards the island of Margarita.  The arsenal found aboard the yacht was not that of peaceful fishermen and the “crew members” were arrested. José Antonio Llama and the commando members were acquitted by an indulgent jury in 1999, supposedly because of “lack of proof”. Hector Pesquera’s testimony surely had something to do with this acquittal.

Another assassination attempt against Fidel Castro had been cooked up in 2000, during the Iberia-American Summit in Panama. The notorious terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, with the help of three accomplices, had planned to blow up the amphitheater at the University of Panama where the Cuban president was to have spoken. A horrifying carnage had been just barely avoided. Posada Carriles and his accomplices were arrested and sentenced in Panama. In 2006, Ann Louise Bardach, a North American, revealed that FBI agent Ed Pesquera, Hector’s son, had given the order to put all the original documents of the Posada Carriles case, which were kept in the Miami FBI office, into the shredder. This was just before Hector’s sentencing in Panama. The Panama Court, as a matter of fact, required the original documents, not photocopies or facsimiles.

After having spent eight years in prison in Panama, Luis Posada Carriles and his accomplices were granted a pardon by the President of Panama, Mireya Moscoso, just six days before she finished her presidential mandate in 2004. Hector Pesquera quit his post as chief of the South Florida FBI in December of 2003. In April of 2004, he was running the autonomous BTS (Border and Transportations Security). He was therefore directly controlling the access to every harbour in Florida. This is how Luis Posada Carriles was able to illegally slip into Miami aboard the shrimp boat “la Santrina”, in the middle of March 2005.

Hector Pesquera held his place at the BTS up until March 26th 2012, the date when he was named, for one year, as the Superintendent of the Port Rican Police. To everybody’s surprise, just two months ago this post was renewed.

Mr President, when one digs a little into the Cuban Five story, and that of  the FBI officer who arrested them, one comes to the only possible conclusion that these Cubans are political prisoners. You must liberate, as soon as possible, the four who are still in prison.

Don’t you think that the time has come to normalize 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
64360 Monein (France)

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.