If We Are Talking About Terrorists

If We Are Talking About Terrorists / Mario Lleonart
Posted on January 30, 2016

Mario Lleonart, 29 January 2016 — A few days ago (January 15th and 16th)
I took part in a gathering in Miami of the Coordinating Liaison
Committee of the Cuban National Meeting, of which I am a member, along
with eight others. On the 18th, on Martin Luther King Day in Saint
Petersburg, Florida, I paid tribute to King, joining in the parade in
his honour distributing copies of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. On the 19th I visited locations in Sarasota and Manatti,
Florida, which had been pounded by tornados early in the morning of the
17th.

While I was doing this, the political police made appointments with or
visited people who know me in Cuba, who take part in forums of the
Instituto Patmos, parishioners, collaborators, friends, neighbours and
family members, to warn them that it was dangerous to have anything to
do with me, inviting them to cooperate with their secret services, and
to turn them against me. After I returned to Cuba some of them dared to
tell me about these contacts, pressures, harassment and threats. One of
the reasons put forward by the Cuban Gestapo, without any support, was
that I had met terrorists in the USA.

In the afternoon of the 20th, I visited Leonardo Delgado, a one-time
political prisoner, in his house in Tampa. He has been battling lung
cancer for five years. With him was Roberto Pisano, one of his prison
companions. His stories about the ancient Cuban prison are shocking.

That morning I had received some mail from Cuba, testifying to the
arguments put forward against me by the State Security. Listening to
Pisano and Delgado's stories made me think how ridiculous it was that
someone in Cuba would say that I had met terrorists in the US, since it
was in fact the opposite.

I replied to the mail saying that if, by any chance I had had a meeting,
without knowing it, with terrorists in the USA, it would have been if I
had unknowingly met an undercover agent, one of the hundreds illegally
infiltrated into the US by the Cuban political police. Like those
involved in the shooting down of the four Brothers to the Rescue pilots,
or those who specialise in assassinating without leaving any traces.

Translated by GH

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