By Karen Lee
HAVANA — If they had flown in on a magic carpet laden with gold and jewels, the 14 women and men who engaged in a 23-day hunger strike against the US blockade of Cuba and the dozens more who aided them could not have received a warmer welcome from the Cuban people.
The islanders, best known for extending their hands and hearts to peoples from Angola to Vietnam, are appreciative of all gestures of solidarity. But when it comes to those who have put their lives on the line, there is no stopping the outpouring of emotion. So when the Reverend Lucius Walker Jr, heading the group that has come to be known as the "Laredo 14" arrived last week, the town went wild.
Some would say that stopping the little yellow school bus from Minnesota, after letting 100 tons of humanitarian aid cross the border from Laredo, Texas, into Mexico, en route to Cuba, was simply a colossal blunder by an inept customs agent that put the Clinton administration in an awkward position.
Most people assumed that in a few days the Treasury Department would realise its mistake and the bus would be permitted to join the rest of the second Friendshipment Caravan in Tampico, Mexico, where the goods were being loaded onto a ship bound for Cuba by Mexican stevedores who were donating their labour, like everyone else involved in this massive effort to defy the United States' 34-year-old blockade of the rebellious island.
But it didn't happen that way. The bus remained impounded in the customs parking lot, tires deflated, battery removed and — for good measure — blocked front and rear by government vehicles. (Perhaps the customs agents feared these pro-Castro crazies would hoist the bus on their shoulders and carry it across the border.)
The days dragged into weeks, and the 13 people sweltering inside the bus in above 100-degree heat (along with wheelchair-bound Jane Jackson, doing the same outside the bus) were fast becoming folk heroes. They were soon joined in their protest hunger strike by hundreds of people in cities throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. An able team of support personnel worked round the clock to get the news out, and lemonade in, to keep the hunger strikers alive in body and in the minds of the public.
Among those who joined them in their hunger strike were Cubans moved by their dedication. At the suggestion of an Episcopalian bishop, and with the logistical support of the Baptist church that has hosted Pastors for Peace and the Friendshipment caravans, church people began their own hunger strike outside the US Interests Section (equivalent to a low-level embassy) in Havana.
They were quickly joined not only by members of other religious denominations (including a group of radical lay Catholics), but by Young Communists, members of Cuba's disabled association ACLIFIM, neighbours who started by bringing them water and offering their bathrooms, and people who read about it in the papers or heard on TV or radio. The hunger strikers — limited by space considerations to about 70 — eventually included a poet, an artist, a Nueva Trova musician, a Cuban Communist Party analyst, two Argentinians, one Spaniard, a retired school teacher who recalled meeting Ho Chi Minh in 1963, and a 14-year-old girl who wrote a protest letter to President Clinton that the US diplomats refused to accept, and decided on the spot to join the hunger strike.
The Cuban branch of the International Red Cross helped them set up tents and monitor the health of the hunger strikers. Fidel Castro and other government leaders visited them in the early dawn hours each day. Bands played music. The church people sang, "Que no caiga la fe, que no caiga la esperanza" (Keep the faith, don't give up hope). Thousands of people passed by at one time or another, on bike, on foot, bearing presents or messages of encouragement.
And this was the climate that the Laredo 14 + 20 (of the support personnel and San Francisco sympathy strikers) walked into when the Treasury Department finally decided it was better off calling it quits and getting the bus out of Laredo.