HAVANA, Cuba.- The exiled president of the Cuban environmental organization Naturpaz, Leonel Morejon Almagrohas sent a letter to Colombian Vice President Francia Márquez to intercede with the Havana regime for the organization’s activists Alex Hall, Juan Alberto de la Nuez and José Manuel Barreiro.
Regarding the three activists, who are harassed and accused by the authorities of non-existent crimes, Morejón Almagro explains in the letter: “Being eco-pacifists and trying to help with the Semillas para Cuba program trying to alleviate the food crisis suffered by Cubans is the paradigm of these men.”
“They belong to that group of eco-pacifist and pro-democracy activists ignored by our Latin American and European colleagues, blinded by an unhealthy loyalty to a cuban government that one distant day fell in love with the left… The silence of that left today allows a moral aberration without a name,” said Morejón Almagro.
Taking into account that the Vice President Marquez She is a black woman, opposed to racism and concerned about the environment, Morejón Almagro reminds her that Alex Hall and Juan Alberto de la Nuez are of African descent.
Regarding the recent meeting held in Havana by the European Union to encourage agroecological production with what he describes as “economic actors associated with the regime that today represses the true Cuban agro-ecological actors,” said Morejón Almagro: “The double standard is astonishing and the complicity with the usual mechanisms of totalitarian control that will prevent the success of “European agroecological investments in Cuba.” And he warned: “There will be no agrarian transformation in Cuba if the ecological transition is born mutilated of its most important attribute: the legalization, recognition and assistance by Europe to NGOs like Naturpaz, which work independently of the same government that has led to ruin Cuban agriculture.”
Naturpaz, the first environmental NGO in Cuba, was created by Morejón Almagro in the early 1990s. The lawyer, who lived in Arroyo Naranjo, in addition to his passion for ecology, defended dissidents in trials, wrote in the independent press and advised on legal issues to the Pro-Human Rights Party of Cuba (affiliated with the Sakharov Foundation), the Commission on Human Rights and Natural Reconciliation and the Liberal Democratic Party.
Precisely because of the ecumenical relationship that Morejón Almagro maintained with several opposition leaders, in 1996 Naturpaz was one of the main organizations that convened the Cuban Council, an attempt to unify the opposition.
On February 24, 1996, Morejón Almagro was one of the first to suffer the repressive attacks of the regime to frustrate the opposition concertation. locked in Marist Villathe headquarters of State Security, Leonel Morejón, accused of being a CIA agent, was subjected to incessant interrogations, psychological torture and death threats. They failed to break him, but in the end he had no other option than exile.
Four decades later, Naturpaz is still active. He recently called for a poetry contest and the planting of trees and other environmental and peace activities in Cuba, the United States and Europe, as part of the workshops of the Sowing Life and Freedom Project that will take place in Pinar del Río, Cienfuegos, Matanzas and Las Tunas.
