Monday, April 6, 2009

Contact Your Representative

The organization Witness for Peace has a webpage that allows you to send an e-mail to your district House Representative in support for H.R. 874, legislation aimed at ending all U.S. travel restrictions to Cuba.

Witness for Peace also has a Cuba program with excellent material opposed to the U.S. embargo, and recently sent a delegation of health professionals to observe some health clinics in Cuba. The Brattleboro Reformer has the story:

From farmers to lawyers, young school children to elderly hospital patients, [Judy] Greenburg and the delegation was able to hear the voices of Cuban people and not the political party reigning over the small island. Part of the Witness for Peace mission is to learn of the embargo effects on the people and take that knowledge back home, said Greenburg.

"We have the privilege of going down here and hearing their stories," she said. "Hopefully this delegation lit a fire under those people who were on it to take action for the people we met."

Cuba is certainly not a utopia, said Greenburg, but all the health care and education services are free to anyone, including a number of American medical students studying at the Latin American School of Medicine.