Lucius Walker: 10 Years Later His Legacy Continues
by Alicia Jrapko / September 9th, 2020
It is hard to believe that it has been ten years ago today since Reverend Lucius Walker suddenly died leaving an enormous emptiness and gap in the movement of solidarity with Cuba and other just causes that in many ways we are still recovering from. I still miss him dearly. We remember Lucius for his bold and charismatic leadership whose ideas influenced and guided many progressives around the world while being a constant thorn in the side of the United States government.
He was a key figure in the struggle to return Elian Gonzalez home and before his death he was increasing his involvement in the struggle to free the Cuban 5.
Walker’s solidarity work did not start with Cuba. In August 1988, he was wounded while on a river boat traveling to the Bluefields region on the East coast of Nicaragua that was attacked by Contras. Two people were killed. Commenting on the event Walker said he had come “face to face with the terrorism of our own government” and blamed President Ronald Reagan for the deaths that day. It was a turning point and led to his founding of Pastors for Peace, a project of IFCO, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization where Walker was the Executive Director. Along with its caravans to Cuba, that continues to this day, IFCO also organized humanitarian aid caravans to Chiapas Mexico and Central American.
It was the beginning of the nineties when many progressives in the United States starting hearing about this African American Baptist Minister in Brooklyn who was challenging the US blockade on Cuba, not just with words but with concrete actions. His project was about bringing humanitarian aid to Cuba without asking the US government for a license, telling them in no uncertain terms that they could not choose who our friends are and that instead of their policy of hate we were going to establish People to People diplomacy with the people of the island.
More:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/09/lucius-walker-10-years-later-his-legacy-continues/
Book mobile headed south, too!
Pastors for Peace Caravan and med students in Milwaukee, July 2016
Last leg of the trip for the Caravan buses.
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Wearing his piano suit along the Malecon, during his trip to the US American Interests Section
Send A Piana To Havana
In 1993 Berkeley California piano tuner Ben Treuhaft was introduced by Green Cities Fund founder TT Nhu to the director of Cuba’s extraordinary National Music School, where talented youth from all over the country come to study in an open and invigorating atmosphere. Ben noticed the sad state of the school’s pianos, and worked many hours rebuilding them. The director insisted on paying Ben for his help, and Ben reluctantly agreed, charging $2.
Knowing he was not supposed to “do business” in Cuba, he dutifully reported his “crime” to the United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the agency charged with enforcing the United States’ draconian embargo against Cuba, which penalizes a U.S. Citizen for accepting “any benefit” from a Cuban with penalties of up to 10 years in jail and fines that can run into millions of dollars. Treasury was not amused, and said they would fine him $7,500 for “tuning with the enemy”.
Founder Tom Miller took on Ben’s legal defense to this and other transgressions that followed – including, over the objection of pianist/Secretary of State Condi Rice, shipping hundreds of donated pianos to Cuban churches and schools (with a license Ben somehow obtained from the Commerce Department’s Office of Missile and Nuclear Technology which stipulated they must not be used “as instruments of torture”), setting up a school for piano repair at the National Music School, and the establishment of “Ben and Jesse’s Piano String Factory” (“Jesse” referring to former Senator Jesse Helms, whose office drafted much of the embargo language). Although Ben faces millions of dollars in fines for his “felony tuning”, he has yet to pay one cent and hopes for the day when the U.S. Government will forgive these transgressions and allow Cubans and U.S. citizens to enjoy music together. Documentary filmmaker Sara Harbin’s “Sonata for Left Hand” tells the story of Ben’s project.
A step in this direction occurred when, in 2009, Green Cities founders arranged benefit concerts in Havana and New York City by noted concert pianist Idil Biret, who charmed both audiences. Meanwhile, Ben still waits for “his day in court” for accepting $2. Read more at: www.sendapiana.com.
http://greencitiesfund.org/portfolio/send-a-piana-to-havana/
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Hot Tuner
by TONI SCHESLINGER
JANUARY 18, 2000
In the key of life: Benjamin Treuhaft, founder of the Send a Piana to Havana International Brigade
PHOTO: MICHAEL SOFRONSKI
A big international operation is going on on East Seventh Street. Benjamin Treuhaft is in his apartment staring at a globe with lots of pale blue oceans and pink continents and going over the plans for his next brigade to move 50 pianos into Cuba. “Any day now, our Western contingent will be driving a semi truck, an 18-wheeler, full of at least one, maybe two 40-foot containers of pianos and moving them across the country to the Harlem River Yard, where they will be taken over the border and into Canada. As we speak, 15 pianos—well, there is also a harpsichord—are waiting in Oakland in a warehouse. The truck will pick up four more pianos in Des Moines, seven in Cedar Rapids. Next stop, Champaign, Illinois—there’s a guy with a piano farm there. Then New York, we got about seven pianos here, and last
Montreal, where the pianos will be loaded onto a Maltese-built freighter and shipped down to Havana, traveling at 15 knots an hour for five days and five nights without stopping.”
Treuhaft, 52, is a little depressed because he had wanted the pianos, accompanied by a troop of piano tuners, to go on a flotilla of 43 boats out of Key West, but “the Cuban government thinks it would be too dangerous, as pirates would be afoot. Anti-Castro Cubans from Miami might get wind of the operation and try to scotch it. The Cubans are smarter than me. But that’s because they’ve been guarding against this longer than I have.”
. . .
The 50 pianos are scheduled to sail on January 18. This is Treuhaft’s fifth Send a Piana to Havana international brigade. Pianos weigh 500 to 1000 pounds, some as heavy as a polar bear, but Treuhaft, an earthy-looking piano tuner with a bit of a stomach and a bandana on his head, is determined to get them into music schools in Cuba. His mission started, he says, on the night in 1993 when he was on his first visit to Havana with a freedom-to-travel group organized by Global Exchange in San Francisco—a protest against the U.S. travel ban that prohibits American citizens from visiting Cuba except for educational or humanitarian purposes. He was having a Mojito rum drink at the Tropicoco Resort and heard a hotel pianist try to tinkle out “Strangers in the Night” and he realized how horrible the piano was. Ivories were missing, among other things. Then he found out how awful all the pianos in Cuba, the most musical of islands, were—ravaged by the salty air and the comegen, the deadly tropical termite that “likes to mate inside piano wood from cold climates like Germany.” From that moment on, Treuhaft vowed he would improve the piano situation, and formed his not-for-profit group.
More:
https://www.villagevoice.com/2000/01/18/hot-tuner/
