Irma
Shewerert is the mother of Rene Gonzalez, one of
the five Cubans unjustly serving prison terms in
US jails for fighting terrorism. She spoke on
Monday evening at a rally to pay tribute to the
victims of terrorism, held at the "Jose Marti"
Anti-imperialist Tribunal in front of the US
Interests Section building in Havana.
During the function, which was
presided over by Cuban President Fidel Castro and
attended by top government and Communist Party
officials and leaders of Cuban civil society,
Shewerert quoted her son: "There is no good
terrorism or bad terrorism, there is just
terrorism."
The mother said that for the
relatives of the Cuban five it is outrageous to
see the double standard of President George W.
Bush. "It is very painful to see how the US
president claims to be fighting terrorism, while
he gives shelter to Luis Posada Carriles, the
self-confessed author of the cruel in-flight
sabotage of a Cubana Airlines DC-8 in October of
1976, killing all 73 people on board.
Referring to the farce of a
legal proceeding being followed against Posada
Carriles in the US, she stressed that the district
attorneys and judges did not even make reference
to the documents declassified by the US
government, full of evidence showing Poasada
Carriles’ involvement in the plane bombing.
She noted that it is the same
prosecution that fabricated the evidence to accuse
the Cuban Five, who have already served seven
years of unjust captivity, amounting to a virtual
kidnapping.
She explained that her son and
his other four comrades had infiltrated the
Miami-based counterrevolutionary and terrorist
organizations in order to defend their country
from the rightwing extremists who have attacked
the Cuban Revolution and its people for more than
40 years.
"Why did they have to do that?"
she asked. And she herself answered the question:
"because it was the CIA that trained, financed and
armed the rightwing Cuban-Americans as US
government documents declassified in 1997 and 1998
show."
She recalled that besides the
plane sabotage the year 2006 also marks the 30th
anniversary of the bomb attack against the Cuban
Embassy in Portugal that killed two Cuban
diplomats and the car bombing that killed former
Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in
Washington. It also marks 35 years since the
attack on the Boca de Sama coastal town, and the
45th anniversary of the murder of young
literacy teachers in Cuba.
She then concluded quoting from
another of her sons, the way she refers to the
Cuban Five. This time she evoked Antonio Guerrero
statement in court: "Cuba, my small country, has
been attacked, assaulted, slandered by a cruel,
inhumane and absurd policy, by a war of terror,
which has caused the worst of pains: death".
