The United States Organization of Pastors for Peace has denounced the arrest of its director Gail Walker, after trying to meet peacefully with Congressman Robert Menéndez to discuss cruel policies towards Cuba.
In the video uploaded to her Facebook account, a policeman can be seen leading Walker in handcuffs, while she explains that she only intended to speak with the senator in his office and demand the end of Cuba’s designation on the list of countries sponsoring terrorism as well as the normalization of relations between the United States and the island.
This was ahead of this weekend’s planned demonstrations in various cities in the United States and the world to demand that the US government remove Cuba from the list of countries sponsoring terrorism.
“We should be able to talk about Cuba with our representatives without being arrested,” Walker said in the video, where he also explained that they requested several times to meet with Menéndez, but never received a response.
“We are in defense of our Cuban family because we believe this policy is unfair,” the executive director of the Interfaith Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO)-Pastors for Peace, added before entering the elevator escorted by two officers.
IFCO-Pastores por la Paz is a group founded in 1992 by Reverend Lucius Walker and which has maintained relations of solidarity with the Caribbean nation for 31 years.
The United States-Cuba Friendship Caravan or, simply, the Caravan of Pastors for Peace, brought to the island in its first edition in 1992, 15 tons of aid for the health and education sectors, two of which were hardest hit by that hostile White House policy.
When the Reverend Lucius Walker gave life to this initiative, his purpose was to circumvent the framework of laws and regulations of the blockade against Cuba by the United States, a policy that, as he defined it, is anti-evangelical and aggressive with a severe social impact in the Antillean nation.
