The Plight of Ana Belen Montes

The Plight 

of Ana Belen Montes

December 30, 2015

Editor's Note: The Cuban Committee for Humane 
Treatment  of Ana Belen Montes has asked us to 
alert our readers to her plight. Throughout the 
world many committees are being formed in order 
to support fair treatment for as well as freedom 
for this friend, who defied the vengeance of the 
empire in such a dignified manner, without giving 
up her love for Cuba and humanity in general. 
For more information, please contact the Cuban 
Organizing Committee,  Dr. Nestor Garcia Iturbe,  
at:sarahnes@cubarte.cult.cu.

To all our American progressive friends:
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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 twentieth and
twenty-first 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 pace -loving 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 for our latest American "Mambisa".

The Cuban Organizing Committee, 
Dr. Nestor Garcia Iturbe, can be reached at 
sarahnes@cubarte.cult.cu.