• Silver City
• Albuquerque
• Los Alamos
• Santa Fe
• Taos

The Pastors for Peace Caravan to Cuba arrives in
Silver City, NM on Tuesday 10 July 2007.
Come see the bookmobile and donate Spanish language books.
Grant County Peace Coalition is hosting the Caravanistas
Visit www.gcpeacecoalition.org for details.

Dana Lubow

On the Bookmobile & The Caravan to Cuba

Pastors for Peace - part of The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization - is a determined bunch of faith based activists that just won't take no for an answer - no matter how many times this, that, or the other US president says that they can't take humanitarian aid to countries like Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, and especially, Cuba.

Dana Lubow is a librarian.  I refrain from saying that she's mild mannered as she is certainly motivated and passionate about books and human rights.  Long committed to progressive values, she has demonstrated against the Vietnam War, Gulf War One and the present disaster in Iraq.  But education and social justice remain central and over the last several years she has cultivated relations with peers in Cuban libraries, culminating with her present effort.

Dana has purchased The Bookmobile - or Bibliobus - here in the United States and provisioned it with about 1500 volumes in Spanish which she will now drive from Los Angeles - by way of Silver City, NM - to Tampico, Mexico on the Caribbean coast as part of the Pastors for Peace Caravan to Cuba.  There the books, The Bookmobile, and several other vehicles, all part of the Caravan carrying tons of humanitarian aid, will be loaded on a ship bound for Cuba.  The drivers and passengers - Caravanistas - will then fly to Havana where they will be guests for 10 days of cultural exchange.

It's not, however, all fun and games.  They are typically harrased and subjected to extensive searches by US Customs - often delaying their schedule by hours and sometimes days.  Though this will mark the 18th Caravan to Cuba, and at least that number of caravans have gone to other destinations in Mexico and Central America since they began in 1988, Pastors for Peace have never been denied a border crossing into Mexico, had their their cargo of aid confiscated (well, sometimes temporarily), been prevented from returning to the United States, or faced serious legal action against them despite their open and public declarations that they refuse to acknowledge or obey US law that would restrict them in their travels or activities.  But as the saying goes, there's always a first time.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

Everyone has the right to leave any country, 
including his own, 
and to return to his country.

Pastors for Peace and Dana Lubow challenge the United States to meet it's international treaty obligations and prove it's commitment to Human Rights.

Click here to watch or here to listen.