Oscar López’s Release is a Victory of Solidarity

The Puerto Rican patriot reiterated his commitment to the freedom of his homeland

Mariela Pérez Valenzuela

After 36 years of imprisonment in the United States, with a sentence of 70 years, the Puerto Rican political prisoner Óscar López Rivero recovered his definitive freedom a few days ago and is back in his beloved San Juan, where he reiterated his commitment to fight for the freedom of his small island of the Caribbean, Free Associated State of the United States since the 1950s of last century.

The release from prison last week of this 74 year-old emblematic revolutionary, inspiration of generations of patriots who want the liberation of their land resulted in a national fiesta, which was attended by his old friends, fighters like him, and, among others, thousands of students on strike who received his solidarity from prison before the measures taken against education by the local government.

At the end of his term, former US president Barack Obama commuted his sentence, but he should serve four months of house arrest, his daughter Clarisa, a 46 year-old woman who never lived with his father and could only see him when she was 10, sheltered him at her home, where he saw many people every day in pilgrimage leaning over the wrought iron-grille of the garden.

Finally, on the 17th, Lopez Olivera opened the doors of the last bars that would contain him in life and merged into an embrace with old and new friends, with a people who welcomed him with a tide of love and accompanied him to the seashore he dreamed of so much in his isolation, a time when alone, he had no news of the outside world.

There, at the beach, at a popular party where famous artists from the national and global campaign for the freedom of this political prisoner sang and danced, López Rivera delivered an emotional speech in which he reiterated his love for Puerto Rico and its conviction to continue the struggle for the liberation of the nation, the last colony in the world, according to the United Nations, which demanded, in repeated resolutions, the definitive separation from the United States.

There, this short, thin, gray, but vital man, announced that he will visit the 78 municipalities of his country on a day of unity, explanations and acknowledgement to those who demanded his release for more than 30 years.

He also recognized the efforts of Latin American nations such as Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia, whose progressive governments joined the worldwide solidarity with this prisoner who in 1981 was imprisoned for belonging to a liberation organization and was the victim of a rigged trial, as it usually happens against the revolutionary fighters of Latin America and the Caribbean on US soil.

From Cuba he received two messages that speak volumes of the friendship between the peoples of the two islands that the poetess Dolores Rodriguez de Tio called ” the two wings of a bird .”

A few hours after his release, Óscar received a telephone call from his friend and cellmate Fernando González Llort in Cuba, one of Los Cinco, who also served a sentence in the United States for protecting his country from counterrevolutionary extremists.

With emotional words, the two men remembered their time together in prison and Gonzalez Llort, president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples and Hero of the Republic of Cuba, congratulated him and told him that he would wait for him in Cuba.

Also Cuban President Raul Castro Ruz sent him a friendly message congratulating him for his release and invited him to travel to Cuba, where he is expected as a victorious patriot, an inspirer of the revolutionary fighters of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Translated by ESTI