The Buena Cuba Socialist Club

On July 31, Pastors for Peace wrapped up their latest “Friendshipment Caravan” to Cuba. During their 10-day sojourn on the island, caravan co-directors Gail Walker and Luis Barrios told Prensa Latina that “the continuity of the solidarity movement with Cuba is a must for people with conscience.”

The Rev. Luis Barrios, Ph.D., is a liberation theologian and co-director of Pastors for Peace with Gail Walker, daughter of Pastors for Peace founder Rev. Lucius Walter, a former associate general secretary of the National Council of Churches. In 2000, Rev. Walker formed a national committee to return Elian Gonzalez, then only six years old, to Cuba. When Cuban dictator Fidel Castro visited New York, the Rev. Walker arranged his meetings. Rev. Walker died in 2010 but this year’s caravan paid him tribute and got a reward in return.

Cuba’s Jose Marti Cultural Society gave Pastors for Peace its highest decoration, “La Utilidad de la Virtud,” (the utility of virtue), reserved for “prominent figures and institutions that promote and defend the foundations of the Cuban nation.” The pastors toured the Cuban provinces of Matanzas and Villa Clara and on July 26 celebrated the Day of National Rebellion. They handed over 100 tons of humanitarian aid collected on the caravan’s tour of U.S. cities.

Pastors for Peace also attended a workshop on the “updating” of Cuban socialism and protested the “immoral” and “counterproductive” U.S. embargo they calculate has caused losses to Cuba of  $104 billion. The damage could “exceed $975 billion if calculations are readjusted to account for the depreciation of the dollar’s value vis-a-vis gold on the international financial market over the past half century,” according to a report by Fox News Latino.

Pastors for Peace also met with relatives of the Cuban agents convicted and imprisoned in the United States for espionage. Pastors for Peace portrays the “Cuban Five,” Gerardo Hernandez, Rene Gonzalez, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero and Fernando Gonzalez,  as “anti-terrorist Cuban fighters unfairly held in US prisons since 1998.” These “heroes” were “detained as they were monitoring violent actions by Florida-based terrorist groups against Cuba,” according to a report from the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five.

“It is very important to us to be here with their relatives, as a great injustice is being committed against them in our country,” Gail Walker told reporters.  “Therefore, supporting them is an extension of our faith as people of conscience.” On the other hand, the visiting people of faith and conscience failed to support any victims of the Cuban regime.

According to Amnesty International, Cuba is a one-party Communist state that restricts the freedom of expression, association and assembly. “All media remained under state control, impeding Cubans’ free access to independent sources of information,” according to the AI report.  “Police and state security officials continued to intimidate and harass independent journalists, scores of whom were arrested and imprisoned only to be released days or weeks later without charge or trial.” Pastors for Peace supported none of the independent journalists.

On July 25 Cuban police arrested more than 40 people at the funeral of Oswaldo Payá, a devout Catholic who founded the nonviolent Christian Liberation Movement and spent three years in a forced labor camp on the Isle of Pines. Amnesty International said the arrests were “another sign of how entrenched repression against dissidents on the island remains.” None of the Pastors for Peace, in Cuba at the time, showed support for Payá or Guillermo Fariñas, the psychologist, independent journalist and political dissident Cuba barred from travelling to Strasbourg to collect the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought awarded by the European Parliament.

Pastors for Peace reserved its activism for the Cuban Five, whose activities included the gathering of intelligence on U.S. military facilities including the Boca Chica Naval Air Station in Key West and McDill Air Force Base in Tampa. They complied names, addresses and medicals files of officers in the Southern Command. The Five also infiltrated the Florida-based Brothers to the Rescue, which alerts the Coast Guard to Cubans risking the “graveyard without crosses” to flee the Castro regime. The Five helped the Castro regime shoot down one of the Brothers’ unarmed Cessnas.

Pastors for Peace is part of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), founded in 1967 “to advance the struggles of oppressed people for justice and self-determination.” But in Cuba Pastors for Peace did nothing to help touch off a “Cuban Spring.” The Rev. Barrios, a liberation theologian, issued no calls for Cuba to be liberated from an oppressive regime. Pastors for Peace issued no manifesto for Cuban democracy and no call for internationally supervised free elections, with multiple parties, a true choice for voters, and no fear of intimidation.

This writer asked the IFCO via email if Fidel Castro or Raul Castro had ever said or done anything with which the IFCO disagreed. Nobody responded. Ross Douthat, now a columnist for the New York Times, once described Rev. Walker and his organization as “a well-established cog in the left-of-left political machine.” Based on their latest performance, they are more than that.

Pastors for Peace are the last worshipful defenders of a loathsome Communist regime headed for decades by an economic crackpot and sadist. As Gail Walker said in Havana, “the continuity of the solidarity movement with Cuba is a must for people with conscience.”