Amnesty International issues urgent action for Cuban prisoner of conscience Eduardo Cardet

Today, January 31, 2017 Amnesty International issued an urgent action for Eduardo Cardet. This blog has been following his plight since last November and welcome the news that Eduardo's case is receiving greater international attention and scrutiny by a well respected international human rights organization.

URGENT ACTION

demand release of human rights defender

Five days after Fidel Castro’s death, human rights defender Eduardo Cardet was detained and has since been held in provisional detention in Holguín, south-east Cuba. He is a prisoner of conscience who must be released immediately and unconditionally.

Dr. Eduardo Cardet Concepción, leader of the Christian Liberation Movement (Movimiento Cristiano Liberación, MCL) since 2014 was arrested in Holguín on 30 November 2016, five days after the death of the former leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro. Eduardo Cardet has spent two months in the provisional prison (prisión provisional) of Holguín. He has been refused bail on three occasions, according to his wife. 

According to five witnesses who spoke to Amnesty International by telephone on the condition of anonymity, Eduardo Cardet was pushed off his bicycle and violently detained in the early evening of 30 November by at least four plain clothed and one uniformed police officer as he returned home after visiting his mother. It is not clear on what grounds Eduardo Cardet was initially detained. According to his wife, who witnessed her husband’s detention with their two children, Eduardo Cardet is charged with attacking an official of the state (atentado). This offence is covered under Article 142.1 of the Criminal Code. One officer is alleging that Eduardo Cardet pushed him during his arrest. 

All witnesses who spoke with Amnesty International counter this allegation, and state that Eduardo Cardet was quickly and violently restrained by plain clothed officials, placed in handcuffs, and beaten, and had no opportunity for self-defence. The witnesses believe that Eduardo Cardet was arrested for his beliefs and ideas.

Yaimaris Vecino, Cardet's wife:"They badly beat up Eduardo in prison while he was handcuffed."

Prior to his arrest, Eduardo Cardet had given interviews published in international media in which he had been critical of the Cuban government. In an interview with Madrid-based radio station esRadio, aired two days before his arrest, he described the mourning in Cuba following the death of Fidel Castro as imposed, and said: “Castro was a very controversial man, very much hated and rejected by our people”. According to the MCL’s website, Eduardo Cardet’s lawyer informed the family on 27 January that the Public Prosecutor is seeking three years of prison.

Please write immediately in Spanish or your own language:

•  Calling on the authorities to release Dr. Eduardo Cardet immediately and unconditionally, as he is a prisoner of conscience, imprisoned solely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression;
•  Calling on them to guarantee the peaceful right to freedom of expression, assembly and association including for dissident, opponent or activist voices and to repeal all legislation which unduly limits these rights;
•  Urging them to ensure that, pending his release, he is provided with any medical care he may require; that he is not tortured or otherwise ill-treated; and that he is granted regular access to family and lawyers of his choosing.

PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 14 MARCH 2017 TO:

President of the Republic

Raúl Castro Ruz    

Presidente de la República de Cuba

La Habana, Cuba  

Fax: +41 22 758 9431 (Cuba Office in Geneva); +1 212 779 1697 (via Cuban Mission to UN)

Email: cuba@un.int (c/o Cuban Mission to UN)

Salutation: Your Excellency

Attorney General  

Dr. Darío Delgado Cura       

Fiscal General de la República

Fiscalía General de la República        

Amistad 552, e/Monte y Estrella          

Centro Habana, La Habana, Cuba       

Salutation: Dear Attorney General/ Señor Fiscal General

Also send copies to diplomatic representatives accredited to your country. Please insert local diplomatic addresses below:

Name Address 1 Address 2 Address 3 Fax Fax number Email Email address Salutation Salutation          

Please check with your section office if sending appeals after the above date.

Jailed pro-democracy leader Eduardo Cardet of the Christian Liberation Movement

URGENT ACTION

demand release of human rights defender 

Additional Information

The Christian Liberation Movement (Movimento Cristiano Liberación, MCL) is a prominent actor in the pro-democracy movement in Cuba. According to its website, it is a movement for peaceful and democratic change and respect for human dignity. It was founded in 1988 by Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, who became a visible figure of the Cuban political opposition, and four other activists. 

In March 2016, according to news reports, the MCL presented 10,000 signatures to the Cuban parliament in support of Project Varela – a long-standing proposal which advocates constitutional reform within Cuba and promotes freedom of association and speech, free elections, freedom of religion, and amnesty for political prisoners, among other things. According to Article 88 of the Cuban Constitution, laws can be proposed by citizens if a proposal is made by at least 10,000 citizens who are eligible to vote. In July, the MCL submitted a proposal to the Cuban parliament entitled “One Cuban, One Vote” (Un cubano, un voto) which makes a series of recommendations for reforms to the electoral law. 

Amnesty International has documented harassment and intimidation of members of the MCL for decades. In 1991, after Osvaldo Payá Sardiñas presented a petition calling for a national referendum relating to constitutional reform, he had his home destroyed by over 200 people, said to be members of a Rapid Response Brigade. After Osvaldo Payá announced his intention to put himself forward as a candidate for deputy to the National Assembly for the municipality of Cerro, Havana, members of his organization were reportedly subjected to frequent questioning and short-term detention.

Osvaldo Payá died in a car crash in 2012. In October 2012, Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez was arrested along with her husband Reinaldo Escobar and a third person who was with them in the south-eastern Cuban town of Bayamo. Yoani Sánchez was due to cover the opening of the trial of Spanish politician Ángel Francisco Carromero Barrios who was charged with involuntary manslaughter for the car accident that resulted in the death of Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero Escalante. [ It wasn't a car accident but a state security engineered extrajudicial execution and Carromero was the victim of a show trial to cover-up the government orchestrated murder.]

Provisions of the Cuban Criminal Code, such as contempt of a public official (desacato), resistance to public officials carrying out their duties (resistencia) and public disorder (desórdenes públicos) are frequently used to stifle free speech, assembly and association in Cuba.

The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a Cuban-based human rights NGO not recognized by the state, documented a monthly average of 827 politically motivated detentions in 2016. In an interview published on 16 September 2016 by ABC International, Eduardo Cardet stated: “Political activities are passed off as criminal offences such as inciting public scandal, contempt of or offences against the authorities, and the political police use these classifications to lock up dissidents" (Se disfraza la actividad política con hechos delictivos comunes, por ejemplo, escándalo público, desacato, atentado, figuras que utiliza la policía política para encarcelar a los disidentes).

Cuba is closed to Amnesty International and nearly all independent international human rights monitors.

Name: Dr Eduardo Cardet Concepción

Gender m/f: male

UA: 32/17 Index: AMR 25/5601/2017 Issue Date: 31 January 2017

Remembering how Gandhi lived on the 69th anniversary of his assassination

"My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him. " - Mohandas Gandhi

Mohandas Gandhi

69 years ago today Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated but his nonviolent legacy remains intact and continues to inspire others. Gandhi was gunned down on January 30, 1948 while on a walk at Birla Bhavan by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse.  He was 78 years old at the time of his death.  However, it is more important to remember how he lived and not how he died. The documentary series "A Force More Powerful" studies Gandhi the nonviolent strategist in his struggle for Indian Independence but an interview with Fox Movietone News in 1931 shows us Gandhi's personality and sense of humor:



Below are ten quotes to read and reflect on from this practitioner of nonviolence: 

"No people have risen who thought only of rights. Only those did so who thought of duties."

"Appeasement has become a word of bad odor. In no case can there be any appeasement at the cost of honour. Real appeasement is to shed all fear and do what is right at any cost."

"I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson toconserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power that can move the world." - Young India Journal, September 1920

"It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

"Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong but of the weak."

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."

"A saint who considers himself superior to a sinner forfeits his sainthood and becomes worse than the sinner, who unlike the proud saint, knows not what he is doing."

"Centralization as a system is inconsistent with non-violent structure of society."

They say, 'means are, after all, means'. I would say, 'means are, after all, everything'. As the means so the end.

"The truth is that cowardice itself is violence of a subtle type and therefore dangerous and far more difficult to eradicate than the habit of physical violence."

Prayers for Cuban dissident Harold Cepero on what should have been his 37th birthday

"Those who remove and crush freedom are the real slaves." - Harold Cepero Escalante (January 29, 1980 - July 22, 2012)

Harold Cepero (January 29, 1980 - July 22, 2012)

Over twitter today a young woman remembered a dear friend of hers extrajudicially executed by Castro regime agents on what would have been his 37th birthday. Below is  the actual tweet by Rosa María Payá:

Hoy #HaroldCepero cumpliría 37años. Sus verdugos no saben el daño que le hicieron a #Cuba
Hoy hasta las gaviotas de la #Ermita tienen frío. pic.twitter.com/QaIWPAarEU

— Rosa María Payá A. (@RosaMariaPaya) January 29, 2017

It translates to English as follows: "Harold Cepero would have turned 37 years old today. His executioners do not know harm they have done to Cuba. Today even the gulls of the Ermita are cold." The dictatorship in Cuba has spent decades repeatedly murdering the future and they did this in the case of Harold Cepero Escalante who was killed along with Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas on July 22, 2012.

Harold Cepero was a youth leader in the Christian Liberation Movement founded by Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and other lay catholics that embraces the ideas of  Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Harold was a young man of exceptional conscience and courage who spoke out, took nonviolent action for a better Cuba and understood the importance of rejecting hatred:

"Under the pretext of defending freedom they are attacking it. Martí would say it like this: 'The knife that is stabbed in the name of freedom is plunged into the chest of freedom.' They should think if at the bottom of this attitude there is a real respect for freedom, because to say freedom, to be free, is not to snatch the freedom of others." 

Fidel Castro is dead but his harmful legacy has robbed Cuba's future of young leaders such as Harold. Today we find the national leader of the Christian Liberation Movement still falsely imprisoned for speaking his mind when the old Cuban tyrant died in November of 2016.

Holocaust survivor  Elie Wiesel understood that we owe it to the victims of repression to remember because : "To forget the victims means to kill them a second time. So I couldn't prevent the first death. I surely must be capable of saving them from a second death." We also it to the living because in forgetting we invite more such crimes.

We must remember the victims of Castroism and pray for the dead and wounded while continuing to denounce these crimes and demand justice.

Jose Marti, The White Rose remembered at FIU and opposition activists honored

La Rosa Blanca [The White Rose]

The White Rose

The first Cuban exile organization came into existence on January 28, 1959 in New York City to denounce mass executions then being carried out in Cuba by the Castro regime. This new organization was called "La Rosa Blanca" [The White Rose] after a poem by Jose Marti.  It has been said, although it is possibly apocryphal, that when a friend betrayed him to the police José Martí sent him the following poem:

Cultivo una rosa blanca

En julio como en enero,

Para el amigo sincero

Que me da su mano franca.

Y para el cruel que me arranca

El corazón con que vivo,

Cardo ni ortiga cultivo,

Cultivo una rosa blanca.  

It translates to English as follows:

I cultivate a white rose 

In July as in January 

For the sincere friend 

Who gives me his hand frankly. 

And for the cruel person who tears out 

The heart with which I live, 

I cultivate neither nettles nor thorns: 

I cultivate a white rose.

This poem is a message of reconciliation that is ever relevant and is at the heart of the first Cuban exile group opposed to the Castro brothers. The United States in January of 1959 had recognized the Castro regime and had full diplomatic relations. One year later on January 28, 1960 these Cuban exiles, Rafael Diaz-Balart among them, were arrested when they tried to place flowers at a statue of Jose Marti in Central Park in New York City despite having obtained the proper permits.

The resistance to the Castro tyranny was a natural reaction to the terror imposed by the totalitarian regime in the first days of January 1959 at a time when the United States was mistakenly supporting that regime believing that it would lead to a restoration of democracy  following the Batista dictatorship (1952 - 1958).

Jorge Luis Garcia Perez "Antunez" and Felicia Guillén Amador with the Diaz-Balart brothers

Fifty eight years later the Castro regime continues to destroy Cuba and The White Rose gathered at Florida International University's Law School building named after Rafael Diaz-Balart to award the "Juana Gros de Olea" prize to two patriots of the internal opposition: Jorge Luis Garcia Perez "Antunez" and Felicia Guillén Amador who continue to resist tyranny in Cuba.

It is also important to recall that another White Rose emerged independently halfway around the world years earlier resisting another dictatorship. 

Holocaust Memorial Day 2017: Never Forget and Remain Vigilant

"To forget the victims means to kill them a second time. So I couldn't prevent the first death. I surely must be capable of saving them from a second death." - Elie Wiesel

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere. - Primo Levi, 1986 The Drowned and the Saved 

Holocaust Memorial Day 2017 marks the liberation of Auschwitz 72 years ago today. 

It is a day to remember that whenever we fail to recognize that we are all human beings we risk a repetition of this dark chapter of human history. 

We must never forget what happened and remain vigilant now and in the future.

Below is a video from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the path that led to the genocide in Germany.



Unfortunately the late Nat Hentoff pointed to another holocaust that we could have stopped in Rwanda in 1994, but the world failed the people of that nation.

Today we maybe witnessing another in Syria targeting religious minorities, including Christians. 

How Google is helping the Castro regime turn the internet into a Trojan Horse against Cubans

How Google's technology is empowering Castro's secret police

Photo credit: Fox News/Marta Dhanis

The reality that Google's deal with the Castro regime and how it benefits the dictatorship while harming Cubans has made it into a major news story. Marta Dhanis, a news correspondent, who visited Cuba to see first hand if there has been an improvement in internet access found that it continues to be "extremely limited."  She dug a little deeper into the cliched feel good news about Google's partnering up with the Cuban dictatorship and talked to Cubans inside the island and the result is the article titled "Google entering Cuba is 'Trojan Horse' that could reinforce regime, residents say." In the article the perspective from an academic points to something far more sinister:

“We call the internet a ‘Trojan Horse.’ The success of this government has been possible thanks to the people’s lack of information,” said a 57-year-old retired professor who requested anonymity for fear of retribution by the communist regime. “I would have a patrol car at my door tomorrow to monitor my life,” he said. On the other hand, he and others contend, this Trojan Horse is also providing the communist regime with technology that will empower the secret police with detailed reports of the users’ searches and profiles, right down to their location.

We have documented on this blog how Google in Cuba has collaborated with the Cuban intelligence services and how the Castro regime's tech monopoly ETESCA is blocking the e-mails of the Ladies in White. This has led to a coalition of Cubans to condemn Google at a gathering in Puerto Rico in 2016, But what is being prepared with this deepening of relations between Google and the Castro regime is a nightmarish scenario that we have already seen played out in China where dissidents were rounded up, some jailed, and some tortured with the aid of American technology companies like Yahoo.

In 2006 Amnesty International released a report exposing the practices of American tech companies including Google titled "UNDERMINING FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN CHINA. THE ROLE OF YAHOO!, MICROSOFT AND GOOGLE."  In the report Amnesty International stated that  "Google has come closest to acknowledging publicly that its practices are at odds with its principles."

Tragically, a decade later the pattern is repeating itself in Cuba.

Bitter Harvest: One hundred years of communism and the Ukraine

Remembering Holodomor and the ongoing Russian occupation of Ukraine today

2017 marks the one century mark since the first communist regime took power in Russia and created the Soviet Union. Next month on February 24, 2017 the film Bitter Harvest brings to the big screen one of the great unknown crimes of the 20th Century the Holodomor against the people of Ukraine carried out by Josef Stalin.




According to the website Remembering Holodomor the word itself is based on two Ukrainian words: holod – ‘hunger, starvation,famine,’ and moryty – ‘to induce suffering, to kill’).  This was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, committed by the Soviet Communist regime in 1932–33.

The Soviet Union was brought to an end in 1991, but today a former KGB officer rules Russia with an iron fist and with the "flexibility" of the Obama Administration invaded Ukraine and occupied and annexed Crimea in 2014.




Ceasefire Zone tells the story of what happened in Ukraine in 2014 through the eyes of Carlos Gonzalez, a news correspondent there on the ground. He is crowdfunding to complete the documentary.

Past is prologue to the present that also defines the future. The tragic history and present of Ukraine must be remembered, denounced and the continuing plight of the Ukrainian people recognized. 

El Sexto freed but there are still many political prisoners in Cuba

"El Sexto free. Others yet to be freed. Let us not forget them." - Jorge Olivera, former Cuban prisoner of conscience, January 21, 2017 over twitter.

One freed but two highlighted before remain jailed and there are others

Danilo Maldonado, also known as El Sexto was held in a Cuban prison without charges from November 26, 2016 until January 21, 2017 when he was suddenly freed. What happened on November 26th? The Cuban totalitarian dictatorship announced that Fidel Castro had died and El Sexto broadcast himself writing "Se fue" [He's gone] over social media. A short time later state security rounded him up and imprisoned him.  The good news is that he is free now, although not allowed to travel outside of Cuba.

However others were badly beaten and/or are still imprisoned for refusing to mourn the death of Fidel Castro or criticizing the legacy of the dead dictator.

Not as lucky as El Sexto was Carlos Alberto González Rodríguez, age 48, who painted "Down with Castro" graffiti in Las Tunas and was sentenced to two years in prison under the charge of "Peligrosidad Social Pre-Delictiva” (Pre-Crime Social Dangerousness).

Eduardo Cardet, national coordinator of the Christian Liberation Movement imprisoned since returning to Cuba on November 30, 2016 after criticizing the legacy of Fidel Castro and his regime over mass media. Cardet was initially threatened with a 15 year prison sentence but is now being threatened with three years in prison and has been badly beaten on more than one occasion.

One need not be a political dissident to get into trouble. Darío Pérez Rodríguez, age 49, resident in the Eastern city of Holguín on January 4, 2017 was sentenced by the municipal tribunal to a year in prison for "defaming the martyrs of the Homeland", a crime found in Article 204 of the Penal Code. What did he do? He refused the order issued at his workplace to watch Fidel Castro's funeral on television.

There are many others who like Julio Alfredo Ferrer Tamayo were arrested before the death of Fidel Castro who remain jailed for their dissent.  Julio Alfredo is a human rights activist, attorney and he has been arbitrarily detained since September 23, 2016 for demanding that authorities respect national legislation and the right to associate of nongovernmental organizations of independent Cuban civil society.

This is but a small piece of the overall human rights situation in Cuba where dissidents have also been the targets of brutal physical attacks and extrajudicial killings. Unfortunately the international community has given the Castro regime a pass.

Rosa María Payá warns if she goes silent on twitter that she has been arrested

Please keep an eye on this young Cuban activist on her twitter account.

Rosa María Payá Acevedo followed by state security vehicles in Cuba

Rosa María Payá Acevedo who returned home to Cuba on January 18, 2017 to meet with Cuban dissidents and promote the Cuba Decide campaign has tweeted several messages today that should raise the concern of people of good will especially her last one:

3:16pm: Today I'm followed by two blue cars: Hyundai and Peugeot. At least three men in each. Are they the same ones who killed my father?

Rosa María Payá at her dad's tomb

3:20pm: Unknown men filmed me from a Hyundai and a Peugeot. Abusers as people. Abuser as a regime. This is Castroism's legacy.

The Hyundai that has been following Rosa María in Cuba

3:22pm: A government like Cuba's that harasses its citizens has no future. Although it lasts as long as it lasts, we Cubans will live in freedom.

3:24pm: If I stop posting on Twitter today, its that I was arbitrarily arrested by agents of this Cuban tyranny that no Cuban chose.

President Obama's commuting Oscar López Rivera: Freeing another terrorist backed by the Castro regime

"I am an enemy of the United States government." - Oscar López Rivera to federal judge Thomas McMillen (1983)

1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing committed by Cuban backed FALN. 

NY Daily News Photo By Harry Hamburg  

Yesterday President Barack Obama granted clemency to Oscar López Rivera, a founder of the Armed Forces of National Liberation Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), who has been portrayed by leftists as a political prisoner while downplaying his violent past, but the facts demonstrate otherwise. The New York Daily News on January 17, 2017 offered the following summary:

FALN placed more than 130 bombs in American cities — including one in New York on Jan. 24, 1975. The explosive went off in busy Fraunces Tavern during lunch hour. Four people died, including Frank Connor, a 33-year-old father. “I faced Lopez six years ago at his parole hearing ... If he had expressed any atonement, any sympathy or empathy ... we’d have recommended he be released. But he didn’t,” said Joe Connor, who was a 9-year-old when his father was killed. López got 10 years tacked onto his sentence when he and a fellow FALN member were caught plotting a prison break that included killing their guards. 

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Counterterrorism Division: "Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” By this definition Mr. López Rivera is a terrorist.

Oscar Lopez Rivera, convicted FALN terrorist, taken to jail July 2, 1981 after Chicago trial. (AP)

The New York Daily News on January 16, 2017 described another bombing attack that claimed a young life, injured six and caused the evacuation of a 100,000 workers from Manhattan offices:

On Aug. 3, 1977, the FALN struck again in a coordinated attack in Midtown. An alert office worker at 342 Madison Ave., near 43rd St., noticed a suspicious package and evacuated the building. No one was hurt in the subsequent blast.Workers at the Mobil Building at 150 East 42nd St. weren't so lucky. An FALN bomb planted there killed 26-year-old Charles Steinberg. The building's ground-floor windows blew out and several New Yorkers were critically injured by a shower of glass. It was a bloody and chaotic mid-morning scene in the heart of the city. An NYPD cop described the sidewalk in front of the Mobil Building to a Daily News reporter as a "human mess." The FALN called in a dozen other bomb threats, forcing evacuations around the city. Mayor Abe Beame called the day's violent chaos an "outrageous act of terrorism." When López Rivera was arrested in 1981, the FBI found six pounds of dynamite and four blasting caps in his Chicago apartment along with numerous fake IDs.

In 1999 by the Committee on Government Reform conducted an investigation into President Clinton’s decision to offer clemency to sixteen FALN and Macheteros terrorists and offered the following report on Oscar Lopez-Rivera who while in prison planned a bloody escape that would have caused further loss of life:

An individual so "non-violent" that he wouldn’t renounce violence to get out of prison. In addition to crimes committed in furtherance of FALN goals, he plotted two escapes from federal prison. One was from Leavenworth Penitentiary and, according to a Victim Impact Statement, he "planned to blow up Fort Leavenworth with the most powerful plastic explosives known to the military, riddle guard towers with rounds from automatic weapons, and throw grenades in the path of those who pursued them. To achieve their goals, Lopez and Brown considered killing the inmates who threatened Richard Cobb, killing George Lebosky after they became suspicious of him, and killing firearms dealer Michael Neece to gain his weapons." 

There is a moral chasm between an individual advocating the violent overthrow of a government and using the force of arms to lash out against civilians in order to generate fear to effect change and individuals exercising their fundamental human rights to achieve nonviolent change. 

Frank Connor, a 33-year-old dad killed by FALN with his son Joe

Both are political prisoners but the first is a also a terrorist  while the second is the antithesis of a terrorist and a prisoner of conscience.  The terrorist uses terror to dominate by fear, murdering innocent civilians, while the person of conscience seeks to empower others by their example, ideas and arguments in a celebration of life.

The Castro regime has been linked to the FALN terrorist organization by a Cuban defector that alleges the group had received funding from Havana.  An initiative held in Havana, Cuba in 1966 called the Tricontinental Conference where Fidel Castro insisted that "conditions exist for an armed revolutionary struggle" aimed, according to Georges Fauriol in Cuba:the international dimension, was to promote violent revolution in Africa and Asia as well as Latin America: 

“At this conference,Cuba and Latin American Marxist Leninist terrorist groups began their collaboration with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and other radical Arab groups in the training and arming of terrorists." 

The Cuban dictatorship set about promoting terrorism as a legitimate tactic of revolutionary violence and published manuals on how to be more effective terrorists that still circulate today. In 1970 the Havana published the "Mini Manual for Revolutionaries" in the official Latin American Solidarity Organization (LASO) publication Tricontinental, written by Brazilian urban terrorist Carlos Marighella, which gives precise instructions in terror tactics, kidnappings, etc. and was translated into numerous languages  and distributed worldwide by the Cuban dictatorship. There is a chapter on terrorism: 

"Terrorism is an action, usually involving the placement of an explosive or fire bomb of great destructive power, which is capable of effecting irreparable loss against the enemy. Terrorism requires that the urban guerrilla should have adequate theoretical and practical knowledge of how to make explosives. The terrorist act, apart from the apparent ease with which it can be carried out, is no different from other guerrilla acts and actions whose success depends on planning and determination. It is an action which the urban guerrilla must execute with the greatest calmness and determination." ... "Terrorism is a weapon the revolutionary can never relinquish."

It should not be a surprise to anyone that President Obama would commute the sentence of an unrepentant terrorist because he has done it before. On December 15, 2014 he commuted the sentences of three of Castro's secret police who had planned terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and had been sentenced to life in prison. One of them, Gerardo Hernandez was sentenced to a double life sentence for his role in a murder conspiracy that cost the lives of three U.S. citizens and one resident on  February 24, 1996 in  the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. Worse yet President Obama tried to downplay the crime as a "tragic circumstance" four days later on December 18, 2014.

Despite the Castro dictatorship's celebration of American terrorists who have attacked the U.S. Capitol and ample reason to keep Cuba on the list of state terror sponsors the regime was removed from it on May 29, 2015 by the Obama State Department.

Edmund Mahoney of the Hartford Courant interviewed a son who lost his father in New York City on January 24, 1975 in a bombing by the FALN, a terrorist organization with links to the Castro regime:

“In the midst of our global war on terrorism, simply put, how can Obama and this administration remove a state that sponsors terrorists from the State Sponsor of Terror list?” said Joseph Connor, whose father died in a 1975 bomb attack at Fraunces Tavern in New York by a Puerto Rican nationalist group supported by Cuba. “This action shows Obama’s utter disregard for Americans like my father, who was murdered by Castro’s clients and it tells the world we condone terrorism.” 

This is a shameful legacy not only for President Obama but for all those blinded by their political agendas and ideological prejudices into campaigning for the release of an unrepentant terrorist.

Campaign that succeeded in freeing a Puerto Rican terrorist

Never forget this was  a typical FALN operation of which Oscar López Rivera is a member:

: