Cycle Ride against Injustice

Last summer, when the first Cycle Ride for the Five reached the Julio Antonio Mella International Camp, Medical student Abu Sa Fwad Abu Rob thought about how much he would like to participate in an adventure like that to show his gratitude and solidarity to Cuba and denounce the abuses Israel has committed for more than six decades against Palestine.

Yesterday he returned to the camp and with amazing maturity noted how history gives incredible returns: For the better, because he could fulfil his dream of riding and, at the start of Thursday in Central Park, met Fernando González, one of the five heroes whose freedom was demanded for more than fifteen years.

For the worst, because the barbarism against his countrymen now recognizes the limits of human endurance, and pain of yesterday, today is unanimous indignation. This was reported by youths from different countries studying in Cuban universities and integrated into the sixth solidarity brigade organized by the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) with whom they met on Friday to think of new ways to curb the imperialist genocide.

But hope yells louder than bombs and no injustice manages to be eternal. This was attested by two other cyclists, Adelson Aurelio Macueno and Adriano Bruno Rodriguez, also medical students whose homelands, Angola and Timor Leste, were able to find a decent road to development after decades of occupation and slaughter.

Rounding out the picket were Cuban journalist Claudia Pérez, an ICAP worker, and psychologist Julian Andres Gutierrez, of the Marti Youth Movement and son of a Colombian also exhausted by war and confident that the new round of talks augurs a time of peace.

This is the second Bicicletazo Cycle Ride, and many hoped that they would not have a third, not because they lack strength, but because there is every reason to expect that the Five will be together in Cuba before next summer.

The motto I want you free, is not only for them, but for all victims of injustice in the world, and also for those learning to enjoy the rights won, like Dr. Leandro Nascimento, a young Brazilian man who led the march in 2013 and did not come to the second round so as not to quit his new crusade in life in the community of Jequie province of Bahia, where he was the first and only doctor.

The expedition will continue on Sunday elsewhere in Artemisa, escorted as usual by cyclists from the different villages that their route crosses, and ends in the capital on the 19th at the Salvador Allende School of Medical Sciences.

Translated by ESTI