The text,
sent to State Secretary Hillary Clinton and to the Secretary of
Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, asks the US Government to grant
visas to Olga Salanueva and Adriana Perez, wives of Rene Gonzalez
and Gerardo Hernandez, respectively.
The signatories of the letter include linguist, philosopher,
political analyst and activist Noam Chomsky; Marxist intellectual
and historian Michael Parenti; Gayle McLaughlin, Mayor of Richmond;
actor Danny Glover and former congressman Esteban Torres.
Writer Alice Walker; poet and Professor of History at the Santa Cruz
University in California, Angela Davis; Wayne Smith, former chief of
the US Interests Section in Havana; and Yury Kochiyama, a civil
rights activist, among others, also signed the document.
Prensa Latina news agency reports that, for over a decade,
Washington has denied Olga and Adriana the right to visit their
husbands in prison.
Rene,
Gerardo, Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Labañino and Fernando Gonzalez were
tried in a biased process in Miami and they were given harsh and
unjust sentences for monitoring extreme right anti-Cuba groups in
South Florida that were planning and carrying out terrorist actions
against the Caribbean nation.
On July
15, 2009, the US State Department denied a visa to Adriana for the
tenth occasion while Salanueva’s humanitarian visa request was
rejected last December 18th.
The signatories of this petition are members of the International
Commission for the Right of Family Visits, comprised of more than
170 personalities from 27 countries.
