Pastors for Peace and hundreds of volunteers from the US and 7 other countries are slated to cross the US border into Mexico on July 7th challenging US restrictions on travel and aid to Cuba. The group has used hunger strikes and mass mobilizations to successfully challenge the US governments past attempts to confiscate vehicles and humanitarian aid crossing the Mexican border on its way to Cuba. Since 1992, IFCO/Pastors for Peace has delivered more than 2,350 tons of urgently needed assistance to the Cuban people without seeking a US Treasury license.

In this election year the Bush Administration has started cracking down on people to people exchanges with Cuba. Despite this, the 15th Friendshipment Caravan will travel along thirteen separate routes across the country, stop in 120 US cities and collect over 60 tons of humanitarian aid. This caravan organized by Pastors for Peace, a project of the faith based Interreligious Foundation for Community organization, will travel to Cuba with school buses, computers, medicines, and school supplies collected from groups across the U.S., refusing US treasury department licenses, as a collective challenge to the Blockade and travel ban.

As people of faith and conscience, it is our duty to resist and expose this cruel contradiction,declared Rev. Lucius Walker, Jr., Executive Director and founder of IFCO, a 36-year old ecumenical agency. IFCO/Pastors for Peace rejects this licensing system as both immoral and illegal. It is immoral because it endangers the lives of Cubans and inflicts suffering on innocent children, as well as adults. It is illegal under international law because it uses a sanction to be imposed only in time of war against a declared enemy in order to force another nation to change its government. Licensing is also unconstitutional because it requires people of faith to submit their acts of conscience and friendship to government licensing, in violation of our right to freedom of religious expression, political thought, association and travel,continued Walker.

Members of the press are invited to accompany the fifteenth IFCO/Pastors for Peace US-Cuba Friendshipment Caravan on either all or part of the caravan.

"Let us not love in word: but in deed and in truth." 1 John 3:18 IFCO/Pastors for Peace 402 W 145th Street, New York, NY 10031 212-926-5757; fax: 212-926-5842; web: http://www.ifconews.org