OPEN LETTER TO THE CUBAN ARMED FORCES

October 10, 2002

In light of the possibility of an internal or external situation of catastrophic proportions due to the fact that Cuba is being listed as a terrorist state; in which Castro continues to use terror, drug trafficking, money laundering, blackmail, and covert action as legitimate tactics to obtain his political objectives and maintain himself in power.

It is essential that you members of the Cuban Armed Forces be prepared to take the necessary measures to neutralize the increasing aggressiveness, senility, and emotional instability of a dictator who has under his control clandestine laboratories with the capacity to produce chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and to conduct or support terrorist activities, which not only endanger the international community but also expose the defenseless Cuban populace to the possibility of irreversible contamination.

It is important that you face the fact that the future of our nation is in the hands of an intransigent dictator who is isolated and indifferent to the reality of a civilized world that, each day, grows more interdependent. He is a ruler with 43 years of illegitimacy; who usurped power; who caused tears, blood, and the sacrifice of our people; who, without mercy, forced our brothers and sisters into exile; and who jailed and murdered thousands; thus dividing and separating the Cuban family and the Cuban nation. On Castro’s record, from a population of eleven million, he has caused two million Cubans to become refugees allover the world. Castro is an administrator whose performance of ineptitude, negligence, and absolutism has changed the once prosperous Cuban people into the enslaved beggars of the American continent. As a result of his flawed policies, the future generations of Cuba will inherit a debt of billions of dollars.

Castro is a leader who makes all Cubans carry on their conscience a shared responsibility of generations who have been starved, abused, and prostituted in order to survive under a totalitarian, amoral regime, without dreams, without hope, and without a future. He has created a society in which the hope of the so-called "New Man" of the revolution is to reclaim the right to be free and to escape such harsh oppression and physical, moral and spiritual misery; in search of freedom and social, political, and economic advantages that can be obtained anywhere in the world except in Cuba. It is a shame for everyone that Cubans find themselves today, as our national anthem states, "immersed in dishonor and disgraced," by the chains of a dictator without ethical values and principles, who is committed to sacrifice all the Cuban people so that he can continue to hold the reins of power.

That is why we call on you as sons of the same fatherland, and as "soldier to soldier," to fulfill your civic, moral, and professional duty, and, above all, to act in the best interest of the Cuban nation, our country; thereby protecting and defending the Cuban people, our people, in the restoration of their rights, and helping remove the necessary barriers in order to achieve and facilitate a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba.

We solemnly promise, to collaborate jointly with you in a common front; to re-establish immediately a state of laws that will make way for peace, tranquility, and happiness in the reunification and reconciliation of our families and the Cuban nation; and to guarantee the stability and cohesiveness essential in the development of democratic self-determination, the economy, and prosperity for the benefit of all Cubans.

For an independent, sovereign, democratic and united free Cuba, with all and for the well-being of all Cubans. Signed by men and women of Cuban origin who served in the Armed Forces of the United States of America.