[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 14]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 18643]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                FREEDOM FOR JOSE GABRIEL RAMON CASTILLO

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. LINCOLN DIAZ-BALART

                               of florida

                    in the house of representatives

                     Wednesday, September 15, 2004

  Mr. LINCOLN DIAZ-BALART of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to 
speak about Jose Gabriel Ramon Castillo, a political prisoner in 
totalitarian Cuba.
  Mr. Ramon Castillo is a teacher by training. As a teacher, he was 
interested in helping to instruct and inform his impressionable 
students. After learning about the propaganda mandated by the regime, 
he was unable to continue with the charade of manipulating young minds 
with lies instead of truth. Because of his strong belief in truth and 
democracy, Mr. Ramon Castillo eventually became the director of the 
Independent Culture and Democracy Institute. He also began to work as 
an independent journalist, chronicling the reality of deprivation and 
misery that truthfully characterizes the totalitarian regime.
  According to Amnesty International, Mr. Ramon Castillo was repeatedly 
subjected to persecution and harassment by the regime from the 
beginning of his involvement in the movement to peacefully create a 
free and democratic Cuba. On March 19, 2003, Mr. Ramon Castillo was 
arrested as part of the dictatorship's heinous crackdown on peaceful 
pro-democracy activists. In a sham trial he was sentenced to 20 years 
in the tyrant's sub human gulag.
  It is unconscionable that any man can be sentenced to 20 years in the 
grotesquely inhuman quarters of Castro's gulag for a belief in 
democracy. Mr. Ramon Castillo is one of the many heroes of the peaceful 
Cuban democratic movement who are locked in the dungeons of the 
dictatorship for their beliefs. They are symbols of freedom and 
democracy who will always be remembered when freedom reigns again in 
Cuba.
  Mr. Speaker, it is unacceptable that Mr. Ramon Castillo is 
languishing in the totalitarian gulag 90 miles from our shore simply 
because he believes in freedom and democracy. My colleagues, we must 
demand the immediate release of Jose Gabriel Ramon Castillo, and every 
prisoner of conscience suffering under the nightmare called the Castro 
regime.

                          ____________________