20th November
At a press conference today held at the headquarters of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples in Havana, members of the national and international media heard Olga Salanueva and Adriana Pérez, wives of René González and Gerardo Hernández, respectively, read a joint declaration written by them as their response to the fourth denial of their visa applications, lodged four months ago to go the United States to visit their husbands in prison in the territory.
Declaration by Olga Salanueva and Adriana Perez:
“Once again, we have learnt that the government of the United States has arbitrarily denied us the possibility of visiting our husbands, Gerardo Hernández, condemned to two life sentences plus 15 years and René González to 15 years loss of freedom, who are unjustly imprisoned in the United States.
On numerous occasions, we have addressed the US authorities to ask that they issue visas to enter their territory with the sole objective of visiting our husbands.
No reason exists to justify this denial; we are two women who are suffering, as an additional punishment to the unjust sentences imposed on our husbands, the impossibility of meeting each other even if in very difficult circumstances.
Our families continue to be hostages of the arbitrary nature and violations of human rights being committed in this case. Ivette González, René’s daughter, only five years old has experienced the impossibility of knowing her father because her mother is not permitted to travel to that country and take her little daughter with her.
We demand the cessation of these vindictive, dishonest practices, and the hatred against our families that doesn’t allow the full exercise of the rights that we have to visit our husbands in their respective prisons.
We denounce and refute before the press the false arguments and lies that they try to use to continue punishing these political prisoners, fighters against terrorism”.
At the conference Bernie Dwyer of Radio Havana Cuba asked Olga about the illegality of the US denying Ivette the opportunity to visit her father but she explained to me that in fact the she is one that is being denied a visa not Yvette.
[Olga] It is against me, they are against me. The denial of the visa is against me. Ivette is an American citizen and they say Ivette can freely take an airplane and go to see her father. They say that nothing prevents her from doing so. They do not care about all Ivette has gone through, all that can be in the mind of a 5 year-old girl, who has not even properly met her father due to this cruel situation.
I have discussed this issue with specialists who agree with me in the sense that there is no reason to affect the girl psychologically any more. My daughter has the right, like any other child in the United States, to visit her father, to see her relatives in prison. Ivette is a child whose reality of life is Cuban and sees her father as a hero but a hero that she has seen only in pictures, in some images, a hero who sometimes she does not even recognize in new pictures.
And in her case, if she goes to meet her father, it would be like meeting him for the first time. That is not the case of my other daughter, who already knows him well and can go accompanied by any other person to see René. In the case of Ivette, she would go to meet her father, virtually for the first time, surrounded by officers, in a prison where he is not viewed as a hero and those circumstances would really affect her.
We think that it will do no good but would instead harm Ivette. And it is for that reason that we continue to fight, because we are only demanding our rights. I think that we could possibly both go and see René, but what is even better, I think that perhaps Ivette will not have to go and see her father in prison, but rather I believe that her father will soon return”